My guess is that the experience that leads me to paint is based entirely on composition. If I take a step to the left or right, the relation of the three brown verticals shifts, and the experience that might lead to a painting is lost.

If I find a word to describe what I might paint, such as beautiful, awkward, handsome, harsh, the painting will collapse because I will be referring to words for my experience, rather than to my experience.

The final arbiter in a painting is the board I paint on. Any intention of mine is ruinous. If I misdraw the first two brown verticals, so that forcing a third onto the board would diverge from the experience of the three verticals in the world, there is nothing to do but leave out the third vertical, so that the painting will affect me the way the world affects me, though the two are manifestly different.

Colour comes before meaning. Without colour there is no shape, no composition. I am oblique but rigorous with colour. I sometimes avoid blue for blue water, guessing that blue will produce the appearance, not the experience, of water. Black, for example, can look more like something you can slide your hand into.

Often, painting someone, I cannot attempt "skin colour" because too much mixing would be required, and because a precise colour would separate from the awkward line that is available to me. So I paint someone the green they would be if their skin were green, or the blue they have to be because their shirt is going to be white. Wrong colour bothers me as little as wrong sex, as long as there is a person there who can meet your gaze.

I am often surprised at how a painting differs from the subject, and most pleased when it indicates something I am not qualified to describe. When others see a painting in this light, words fail me.

About the Artist...