ARTIST'S STATEMENT

As a painter and writer I am challenged to find ways of expressing the spirit and emotions involved in the experience of living.

I begin painting by expressing first sparks of my idea through colour and spontaneous drawing. 

It is a dynamic process that stimulates my imagination and it has its own timing and energy. I am also challenged because critical faculties come into play as I attempt to make something meaningful and fresh in each new encounter with a canvas.

I use mostly oils or inks and I am influenced by both western painterly tradition and eastern ink painting. I enjoy the integrating process of combining or alternating both approaches in so far as they allow me incorporate spontaneous and deliberate markings.  The subject of how we embrace our creativity and explore our conflicts engages me deeply. 

Our human creativity is a thread that binds people’s across time and space. Each encounter asks us to embrace imagination and possibility; to bring ideas into form.

Contrasts, of dark and light, of male and female surface in my work. I attempt to rework or reinterpret such ideas in keeping with my own experiences and the sense of their current relevance and resonances in human relationships in the here and now.

When I exhibit work I am grateful when the viewer engages with my images and extends their meaning. Engagement that questions or elaborates can initiate new levels of human understanding for the viewer and artist alike. This contagion effect more than anything is central to a creative ecology. This is how I believe the language of art can help us communicate and cross-fertilise ideas in a way that creates dialogue and understanding. that might be hampered by language barriers.