In delivering the sensation of an Imagining the paint does not represent, it performs, generating force rather than likeness, sensation rather than representation.

Each work begins as an Imagining, a crystallised instant from the imagination. This is not a thought. It is part sensation and part emotion. Coming before image and words, it is both pre and sub-lingual. It soars above language even as it burrows beneath it.

As each work develops in the mind, the Imagining attaches itself to the visual and the verbal. Shifting and groping it draws together particles of reference, sensation and sensory data to form a visual idea. These particles come from many and various sources; they include image and phrase, film and music, concept and literature, myth and fable. These coalescent references give an overall, contingent image that is taken to the canvas.

This process driven work is also, in part, a history of chance and accident. Ordering and shaping the accidental image by the use of paint, the sum and synthesis of steering a sequence of accidents allows a drawing out of figural forms from the surface of the canvas.

Studio tutorials and dissertation research have identified the necessary, symbiotic tension between figuration (representation that can be defined, mastered intellectually) and abstraction (that which cannot be defined and which relates to the irrational, the unconscious and the emotional) as the central issue in making paintings based entirely on Imaginings. That tension needs to exist on the canvas, in order that the sensation of the Imagining may happen and the image can take wings.

Current major influences are the painters Francis Bacon, Ken Kiff and Philip Guston and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.