I dream of clean concepts and elegant geometry, but get distracted by shiny things. My heart wants to sing of the dark, moist, animal absurdity of sex; the joy, the clichés, the utter wonderment of love; And the intoxicating horror of violence. Yet the clear white cube of ironic perfection hooks me with its self-possession. I wish I could be that sure. But my lines tremble, my erasures show, my colour washes have streaks. My concepts are muddied. I mumble them under my breath and dread the moment someone actually expects me to distill them into the written word.

I look for patterns, mirrors, doppelgängers, reflections. Substitutions. I assemble archives. I search for hours. I feel like they fit together, not sequentially exactly, but cumulatively. And there are the images, the special images, that I paint. I wish I could claim a higher authority. But the selections are neither random nor predetermined. I find the image and I see a painting inside it. And I feel that the painting could contain more than just the image. That the paint itself brings the image humanity, makes it whole and slows it down. Because images rush by us so fast, we just keep scrolling down. But a painting is a pause. Contained within its four edges is the time, the consideration, the small struggle: of the artist to propose and the viewer to receive.