In trying to write about my work it has become clear to me the extent to which words and painting are enemies. There’s no use in trying to talk about qualities like furtiveness, when the meaning really lies in the interface of two or more visual qualities, such as fugitiveness and stillness. The visual circumstance is enough. Paintings are visual expressions of evocation, celebration, noticing, facts and inventions, forms fighting shapes fighting colours fighting atmospheres, contrasting qualities, rhythms, facial expressions – in fact anything that can be expressed but not in words.Take for example Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. I could (people do) talk at great length about the compositional qualities of space and rhythm, the way the angled arms create a sort of cutting motif. Not to mention the references to sound and the aspect of time – all this activity condensed in a moment. And the final, central, ironical juxtaposition, the triumph in Marsyas’ eye and the small dog licking his blood. No logic or verbal description could do justice to all of this and much more in this incredibly rich painting.

Anything I say about my work,in the blog or on my website will be a description of my state of mind  or some technical interest, not an attempt to explain it, since if I were to do that it would be an assertion that the complexities and subtleties of the visual world could be reduced to words, which is not the case.