Book J

Synchronised Swimming

Works that illustrate my overall approach to making paintings etc.

Holding the belief that our logical mind, although able to produce beautiful concepts, does not necessarily provide for our greatest creative potential. Instead, by practicing emptying the mind, the confidence to trust  towards working with a process of genuine feedback between the work and the self, develops. Thus we invent without inventing. The impulse to create a painting arises through suggestion from the previous piece of work combined with an emotional response to the place in which the work is being produced. The same motivation influences the choice of painting surface and materials being employed. After the initial mark is applied to the surface, the painting evolves by their being only one persistent instinctual possibility for the next move. When I start thinking about creating something, all sorts of things come in handy, things that are apparently random, useless and logically incompatible, and yet I feel almost subliminally that all these impressions interweave on a plane to which we are not consciously privy. Rather than starting with a recollection or an experience, the act of doing it becomes the experience, so that it is not quite clear why the engagement in a certain work. Because the interest is in plastic matters, rather than in a matter of words, a picture can start, be carried through and stopped with nothing done about the title at all. As a result, most of my titles are given in retrospect, as a way of referring to a work and are generally chosen in connection with formal considerations. More often than not, the work consists of series. The numeric value of the groups have personal relevance on a simplistic though heartfelt level. It takes the full quota to exhaust all possibilities within a process at any given time.