I feel I have finally arrived at a point in my painting career where my work seems to have direction and motivation of its own.
I can remember the first painting I did at Primary School that showed me that I was capable of something special. For the first time I wasn’t the outsider child – I had done something that my peers approved of; I wasn’t used to their positive response and immediately destroyed the painting.
I have always painted and loved the visual arts since. It has provided my only source of continual mental security despite the intense difficulties I have had with it – particularly since adolescence. Thirty years from that first painting I am achieving what I have only recently realised I was looking for. At last my work is reflecting directly what I am personally, without the sense of political or methodological artifice that previous work contained. When I leave any painting I have no care for it anymore; I just need to move on to the next piece of work. If people appreciate it, I am grateful – if not, to be honest, I couldn’t care. I will not modify my work for the benefit of those that think I do it on a whim for public or critical approval. It is difficult to say with any certainty what the current work is about beyond its obvious themes of isolation, loneliness and the dysfunctionality of our modern technologically, media driven society.
People are forgetting that Art drives Science. The artist conceptualises the new, the dangerous and the unacceptable. The scientists follow, and attempt to rationalise these ideas.

“heroin” 1993

back to blog menu