Tractor Painting

I've explored many subjects over my thirty year practice but my current focus centres around multi-panelled pieces inspired by the mechanics of slide puzzles. In these palimpsest works, I apply multiple layers of images, marks and patterns so that they occupy the same composition but in different states, allowing images and motifs to undergo a transformative process between each layer. This method becomes a metaphor for exploring the intricacies of incompatibility or inevitability and can be disconcertingly jarring or consistently reaffirming dependent upon the work. The deliberate scattering and breaking of images, motifs and symbols allows me to explore many different ideas within a single compositional style and is, for me as an artist, a breakthrough in addressing the disorder and confusion I see in myself and the world around me. Alongside the multi-panelled pieces, I engage in the abstraction of complex subjects in my paintings. By deliberately introducing complexity and then allowing it to evolve into abstraction through the reductive process of painting, I seek to evoke pareidolic reactions from viewers — a reminder of our innate human tendency to find meaning in the seemingly abstract and unfamiliar.