My paintings begin in the residue of lived experience — a memory still warm, a dream that refuses to dissolve, the afterimage of an encounter. I work somewhere between figuration and abstraction, not as a stylistic compromise but because experience itself arrives that way: partly recognisable, partly without name. The canvas becomes a place where perception is allowed to thicken, where what was once felt can take on a body again.
The figures that emerge — hunters, wanderers, animals, ambiguous presences — are not portraits of anyone. They behave more like inhabitants of a fable: archetypes drawn from the forests and landscapes where my paintings tend to settle. Forests, in particular, recur as thresholds. They are spaces of intensity and disorientation, where desire, grief, longing and memory move with the same uncertain footing. I am interested in how a personal story, once carried into such a landscape, begins to speak in another register — closer to myth than to confession.
My work is informed by phenomenology, especially the writings of Paul Crowther and James Elkins, and by painters such as Francis Bacon, whose work taught me that paint can register sensation before it registers meaning. I think of painting as a slow distillation: love, loss, desire and memory pressed through gesture, weight, and the friction of the surface until something true remains. The mark, the smear, the hesitation — these are not decorative. They are how the body thinks.
What I hope to make is a space where experience, imagination and perception meet without resolving — a clearing in the painting, open enough to be entered, dense enough to hold weight, brief enough that the forest always begins to close again.
