VISION
I paint from memory. I do not use models or paint anything from life. We carry in our heads the memory of appearances, is a language which connects us at a level much deeper than speech. Appearances exist only in the vision and they have no names. They are in your head and in mine and that is why this work may remind you of your dreams or feel personal. Memory simplifies and filters out the complexity of natural appearances. I want the viewer to feel a subconscious connection when he sees my simplified "generic" version of natural appearances, as if he had had the same experience. People say that my pictures remind them of their dreams.
I borrow objects from the real world to construct a space. But these, although painted naturalistically, are not painted from life: they are made from generic models of the objects that I have in my memory. The objects are recognisable because we all have a visual idea, a subconscious model of what things look like; which forms a subconscious language connecting our experience. We do not have words for these models. They are nameless. It is a language without words that connects us subconsciously.
Words are always generic: the description of light on an object can never show the uniqueness of the event. You can say, "sunlight slanted across the wall" but that will not show exactly how it looked. Our visual experience is continuously specific. These specific experiences form models in the memory that become generic when simplified by the filter of memory.
The colours and the drawing are meant to be beautiful, in contrast with the ideas in the work, which are not decorative. The deceptively convincing natural appearance of the work is meant to seduce the viewer into accepting the reality of what he is seeing. The easy readability of these figurative images is meant to draw the viewers in and to engage them with the dream-like process of remembering, then into interpreting what they see. The messages within each painting are the results of the process, like something washed up on a shore. It is not simply an illustration of a pre-written narrative. To me, the paintings are about whatever they look like in the end. More importantly, it is the viewers, via their own sub-conscious analysis, who decide on the messages that they find.