One cannot make sense of the world all at once.

Visually and aesthetically the paintings often resemble Jumbled collage, direct juxtapositions or standalone mise-en-scene. They are also a collage of painting style or genre and adopt multiple application techniques that enable different impressions of images to be produced. Sometimes they resemble the multiple overlapping open windows of a laptop screen. Pictures have to make visual sense to me in a way that broadly connects back to real events in the world. That does not mean that I make relatable pictures or pictures that tell a particular story in any linear fashion. It means the pictures do have to ‘fit in’ to an ongoing world building vernacular.

I am a painter because what painting allows me to do, is to filter imagery from the world, not all of it beautiful or interesting and transform it into something I can comprehend because I rebuilt it. The perspective for the practice is that of the powerless or passive onlooker. The context of the painting is one of personal fear of and for the world in which it is created. Any subtext within the paintings therefore, often alludes to notions of a geopolitical position or stance on subjects of fantasy, abuse, trauma memory, economics and nightmares.

The imagery that is brought into the painting comes from multiple sources. Often, an image seen someplace may continue to resonate in the mind for some time, years even, before being committed to mimetic process in paint. Encounters in the studio with older paintings, imagery, objects, ideas and memories prompt a continual re-assessment of the mapping of pictorial thought, position, intention and direction in relation to picture making. Response to the same image is often made again and again. What happens both quickly and slowly is a mimesis of found, encountered and collected imagery, which is rendered via an appropriated (learnt) painting genre technique. A filtered mimesis of the mimetic modes of painting.

What the painting is, is a menagerie of style and genre technique wrapping a tangle of imagery.

Images are sometimes distorted via application technique and left unreadable.
Individual images are awarded the status of a token-like or part number component. They often stand in for something, or are left exposed in terms of their inert rhetoric.
The way in which dislodged images are sometimes brought together en-masse is not particularly intended to either generate or erode any meaningful reading by an onlooker, but remains a very personal system of filtering and balancing what makes a picture emotionally resonant for me the maker.