I believe life is marked by ambiguities, social, biological and ethical. My fascination lies in tensions, or polemics that are inherent in these ambiguities and their relationship to the human condition. These relate to questions between life and death , or pain and happiness. Pain is an integral part of being human. When and how much pain is justifiable? What is the distinction between good and evil? Such questions often offer no clear answers.
Initially, my drive to paint is an emotional one, deeper than reason and prior to intellectual analysis.
Meanings that lie beyond representation can be suggested through paint.
In this way, I am searching to explore the boundaries of the visible. As in Paul Klee’s quote, I aim to make the unseen visible. These thresholds of life and death are crucial to my painting – creating the initial emotional response – and a feeling of identification.
The human mind rationalizes and justifies situations, feelings that arise can easily be surpressed. In my work I want to confront the raw emotions that are evoked through certain events. Events such as a patient having undergone heart surgery or the atmosphere of a lethal injection chamber. We are unable to grasp the concept of life and death, but we are able to experience what it feels like to be alive.
Like Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans I confront charged themes from the mass media without offering any clear answer, only through acknowledgement and reflection we are invited to meditate upon the threat and the brutality inherent in humanity.
Richard Serra, a contemporary fellow artist to Richter, said on seeing his paintings 18 October, 1977 on exhibition in the USA:
‘...These paintings aren’t like late Rembrandts, exactly, but they’re disturbing in a way the Rembrandts are. There’s despair in them. And both the Richter and the late Rembrandts are about people recognizing their own solitude through the paintings, which is what we respond to in them.’
Similarly I try to evoke this presence of pathos in my work, present yet partially invisible.