Artist Statement

2026

I paint scenes that arrive as images, and I treat them as received more than invented. They carry the quality of remembered places I have never been, closer to a shared memory than a personal one. Painting is a spiritual practice for me: when I work, I feel guided, as though the hand leads as much as it follows. The Romans called such a guide a genius, an attending spirit that accompanies each artist and is theirs alone, and I understand mine that way, as a companion and not as myself. Tarkovsky described the artist as a servant to something beyond the self, and Lynch described ideas as things you catch rather than make. I work in that spirit.

For years I painted everyday scenes from observation, and I grew bored of them. The imagined scenes came when I stopped asking what I could see and started asking what was arriving. A painting begins with a visual trigger, such as a building that catches my eye, or with a vision that comes unprompted. I sometimes gather sourced images as raw material and sketch quickly, then paint by feel. I paint for the spirit more than for the intellect. The work is made quickly and intuitively, and I look at it afterward to learn what it was about.

The paintings are narrative, but the strangeness is quiet. Nothing in them is impossible; colour and light do the work. I look for ordinary things that could be magical and could also be nothing: shadows that could be leaves, a window glowing slightly too gold, a body in water that comes apart into colour. Each scene suggests a before and an after, but I leave the story unresolved, withholding what happened and what it means, so the viewer completes it or lets it stay a mystery. I keep the viewer at a distance, usually behind or above my figures, so that the viewer witnesses the scene and does not enter it. Space is flattened into fields of warm, high-key colour, scraped and marked with pink, and set against deep navy shadows that give the scenes weight. I work in oil, with visible brushwork and drips. This is magical realism in the register of Bonnard’s saturated interiors, Doig’s dreamlike landscapes, and Tarkovsky’s patient images.

What I bring to that tradition is the position of an outsider. I live a nomadic life, and I am read as a foreigner wherever I go, kindly but consistently, so I have learned to watch in return. My viewpoint, behind and above, is the way I stand in a new place. In those places I feel a recognition arrive, a quiet knowing that something I am looking at is a painting. My current work follows the images that arrive to me now, set in the light and landscapes I am drawn to: coasts, waterfalls, and the warm colour of places I have passed through. I am still working out how little strangeness a scene needs before it feels charged.