I love the present moment. It is fresh, immediate. It contains the unexpected, and offers the chance to come into contact with something new. Suspended in it are our memory and our desires, and also the discoveries, insights, and lessons of those who have come before us.

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I love the past, also. Though it cannot be relived, it can be revisited. It has a certain actuality that can be experienced through avenues, both mental and physical. One can even enter into a kind of dialogue with it. I don’t think I could function as an artist without the possibility of this dialogue. My childhood is still very much an important presence in my work.

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And the future? I love the idea of it, but it doesn’t really exist, does it? Perhaps we can dream about it.

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Time, dreaming and remembering, realization, celebration, mourning and loss are some of the themes I address in paintings, drawings, prints, collages and in the act of collecting objects, arranging them, and meditating upon them. What I see in portraits, landscapes, architecture, and still-lives undergoes a transformation as it is filtered through the pathways of my consciousness. But can I remain in this state, seeing with clarity, with freshness, discovering the unexpected? I must work at it! Paul Cézanne knew very well the importance of this idea and was known to have stood quietly looking at a landscape motif for as long as an hour before actually beginning to draw or paint, allowing himself to concentrate on what his friend Monet called “the retinal image” and believing that “the painter should see like a man who has just been born”. Cézanne is an artist who always seems to be nearby when I am working.

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 As we become artists we are accepted into a very large family. When I am in a studio, a gallery, a museum—or wherever actual works of art can be experienced first hand, I am in the presence of brothers, sisters, cousins, and ancestors. Often, when I am working in my studio, I become aware of the presence of many other artists, of both the past and the present, of their discoveries, their insights, and the lessons they have learned.

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A final note: much of my work over the years  looks to be representational—it is,
but really, everything I make is an abstraction. Paintings, drawings, prints, collages—these are not what they represent. They are the visible end of dreams, memories, feelings, and realisations, and then of the employment of paint, graphite,
paper and ink.

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From the seen we move towards the signified.