at the Biscuit Factory, London March 2019

I Love Mummy, 2012 - 2016

My paintings are arrived at intuitively but are sometimes started with an idea, which in this instance is my son’s childhood and the extraordinary love and excitement with which it infused my life. The painting underwent several stages and was originally inspired by drawings made by my son between the ages of 3 and 5. The silk dress attached to the canvas was made by me years before the birth of my son. Its inclusion here works on many levels: at an instinctive level the delicate pink dress carries its own life-force through which the flux of experience is interpreted in terms of time, while the torn threads become a different kind of brushstroke, one of them carrying the sentence “and on this cloth I found embossed love, love, love” from An Autobiography of a Yogi in which the original word “God” is replaced by “love”.

at the OXO Tower Bargehouse, London 2018

“You have made a cracked, tired wall into a temple: noble and moving, truthful and silent, august yet humble. It breathes life into the memories of our past and reminds me of treasures and loved ones of the past.” (Alexander Samuel K-N)

While painting this I was listening to ‘Nothing to Be Frightened Of’ by Julian Barnes and words, even whole sentences made their way into the painting, but many are no longer visible having been covered up in the process by other layers of paint.