​ The most frequently asked question of any artist is,

What is your art work about?

 

In attempting to answer this, I would first contend that creating art is not work, it is joy. In spite of the common trend to relate art and its creation to more everyday experiences and their measure, I'd like to contend that the creation of art is not of the the everyday experience, nor should it be. After all, art exists to enable us to transcend the everyday, to open our eyes to the meaning in the ordinary and so return us more deeply to a sense of ourselves.

 

Creating art is not work, nor can it be reduced either to hours spent or effort expended. It is not a job, it is an honour bestowed. It is the most serious kind of joyful play.  And so, I have to confess that while I do labour at many things in this life, creating art is not one of them. For here lies my moment of sheer soaring joy. It is the kind of joy that comes from a rare but necessary human triumph: the one that takes place in adversity.

 

Adversity is inevitable in the life of every human being. It cannot be avoided. It is woven into the fabric of the human experience, an experience full of unexpected paradoxes and strange ironies especially in the darkest moments, those against which the human spirit flogs and flails. Those particular adversities that cannot not be overcome. 

 

The strange irony is this: the moment we accept the insurmountable, a deeper non-acceptance begins. The non-acceptance is the refusal to be shaped by what cannot be overcome. It is in this very special kind of acceptance, in this strange fruit that we hold the power to choose how adversity affect us: how we feel, how we think, how we behave, what we learn, who we are and who we become. It is in the unavoidable cycle of adversity with its quiet ironies and hidden paradoxes that we discover not only our greatest freedoms but also our greatest powers. We discover the true nature of our being and the human experience. 

 

For as inevitable as adversity is the human spirit: it may flag and at times flail but its capacity for regeneration and renewal, for growth and perseverance is without measure.

 

My art is, and has always been, about triumph in adversity. Not over adversity because the simple reality is that many adversities in life cannot be triumphed over. And so, the reality in all these images speaks to a vital truth: a truth at the very heart of the human experience.

 

The moment when we discover in our deepest defeat, the beginnings of our greatest triumph.

 

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Figurative landscapes
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If I had to describe  the kind of art I strive to create then I would have to say: figurative landscapes.
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I say that because while the figures I paint all have some resemblance to people I know or have observed, what I am observing isn't how they look. Rather I am observing the landscape of the self as one might observe a storm breaking across some distant hills, ​​​​​​​​​​​or the way light dances on a sweep of ocean. The self in its constant flux and flow.

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When observed carefully, the self is not a fixed star we can navigate by. Rather it is tidal: emerging one moment, disappearing the next; forming and re-forming.

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There are even moments in our lives when the self ceases to be. Our hearts beat but we no longer are: we are not who we were a moment ago and we have yet to become. A moment when we are between selves. A moment of not-being, when we dissociate and are displaced. When the cloak of the self falters, fails and falls apart as the illusions we’ve harboured about ourselves and the world collapse....

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A splinter of time in which our truest self is exposed.

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Fleeting and fragmentary, it is these moments that fundamentally and irrevocably alter who we are, and how we are in the world. The moment of the self without its constructs.

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Here there is no fakery; no contrivance; no artifice; no where to hide. Here everyone is equal. And everyone is equally revealed.
 

I observe as one self ceases, another emerges.
​And in this moment of dissolution and displacement,
​compassion and humanity are born.



 

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Studies in the meaning of wonder

& the grandeur of futility​

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The landscapes of human experience I am inexplicably drawn to sharing and exploring in my work are ones of individual dissolution and diaspora; the personal disassociation and displacement that culminate in silence, solitude​, the death of meaning and... the birth of wonder.​

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In these experiences await the moments of greatest personal truth, of the truimph that lies deep in the heart of adversity.

 

 

 

Subject, Media and Materials

Working on paper, canvas and board, the focus is to create  poignant, emotive and dynamic images based on quiet observations on the human experience. 

 

On paper: monoprints and dry point

On board: charcoal, graphite and glaze

On canvas: glazes and water-soluble media (water-colour, ink, pencil, graphite)