Artist’s Statement

Painting is my practice.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I feel like a homing pigeon who has to return to the studio day in day out.

I see my ‘job’ as a painter as one of looking at the nuts and bolts of painting itself. Art that has come before us historically, forms my vocabulary. I study remote work, from other times and places and try to disassociate the elements (lines, shapes, narrative figures, depictions of flat or illusionistic space) etc.) from the original time and place of their creation. I use the elements that I take to populate my own work. A modernist brushstroke can sit beside a medieval robe in one of my paintings. That co-existence is very exciting to me and speaks to me of the essential abstraction of all painting. Understanding and meaning in art, we are often told, is a matter of understanding art history and the creative forces that lay behind particular images (such as religion, culture, war etc) but I disagree. My thinking is that paintings in every situation, whether the viewer fully understands the ‘intellectual content’, or not, have the power to ‘carry’ meaning. I believe in the immense power of art to move and change us regardless of narrative or cultural context. That is what my work is about.