"Lockdown 1" Painting

Artist Statement
Painting in Search of the Raw Form of Consciousness
I do not seek to establish a style and repeat it. I allow each painting to emerge from the changing state of consciousness, shaped by experience, observation, thought and critical judgement.
I began developing my own visual language through the Juggler series in 2004. Since then, the language has continued to change. I work without a fixed formula, and often without a predetermined image. I allow marks, colour, movement and unexpected forms to enter the process, while remaining critically engaged with what is happening on the surface. The work is complete when it begins to surprise even me—when it opens a possibility that I had not previously understood.
This is also why I see an important difference between an idea and an evolving body of paintings. In science, the same question may lead different people independently toward the same discovery. If one person does not arrive at a particular formula, another may eventually do so. The question remains shared.
Art can begin differently. An artist may develop a visual language from a lifetime of particular experiences, and that consciousness continues to change with time. Another artist may imitate the appearance of an existing painting, but cannot easily reproduce the changing experience from which the next painting will emerge. I do not make the same painting twice, nor do I deliberately return to an established formula. The next work is therefore not simply a variation of the previous one; it is a new encounter with myself.
In this sense, my greatest challenge is not to compete with another artist, but to challenge my own previous achievement. Each painting asks a new question and, ideally, creates another question beyond itself.
My work is abstract, but abstraction for me is not whim or randomness. I think of it as an attempt to approach the raw, unrefined condition of consciousness before experience becomes fixed into a recognisable image. Like crude oil before refinement, it contains possibilities that have not yet taken a final form.
The culture, memories and experiences in which I have lived inevitably enter this process—not as deliberate illustration, but as something already embedded within consciousness. What emerges on the canvas is therefore neither entirely planned nor entirely accidental. It is the result of an ongoing negotiation between conscious intention and deeper levels of perception.