My work in Painting is inspired by notions of musical space, geometry, colour, and the materiality of paint. My work can be described by the terms non-objective, or abstract. I draw inspiration from both the history of abstraction in painting and from the elements of music. Paul Klee focussed his attention on the contents of his paint-box referring to ‘the row of watercolours as a keyboard of colours for improvisation ...’

My paintings are ‘hand-made’, lines are drawn, erased and redrawn or semi-randomly poured. Colours, subject to variation, are mixed and remixed, nuanced by the addition of pure pigments. Edges are characterised by irregularities resulting from the process of painting. Single or repeated lines indicate a speed, a direction, a border between shapes, an acceleration or a slowing.  Colours present themselves in continuous flux, related to changing conditions, inferring a mood or a feeling. The intended experience is not one of exactitude but of the lived value found not only in central relationships but also in the edges of things, in the imperfections and juxtapositions.

If colour can be employed in a way that parallels music, then music also answers to mathematics, and in turn to a set of geometries which orchestrate pattern and movement. In classical music it is customary to describe the tempo of a piece by one or more words, often indicating in addition the mood of a piece. I often refer in my paintings to musical forms and structures, such as theme and variation, transposition, rhythm and repetition.

You ask why I paint abstract pictures, what are they about? 

I answer by saying it is like you are listening to a piece of music, for example by Bach, there is structure that comes from maths, patterns which recur, are repeated with variations; you take away a feeling of calm. It is like walking along the shoreline and watching the effects of light on the water, or looking through a venetian blind at a sunset or a bright cloudless sky. It is also like being in Paris and looking at stained glass windows in a cathedral while listening to a solo voice or a choir or a flute– you get a feeling which might be excitement, or a sense of peace, then you see the repeating patterns in intense blues and reds as the light shines through the windows; And then there are the extraordinary Robertson sunsets... 

There are no images you can recognise in my paintings, but as you spend some time engaging with the work, I feel that I have been successful if you are able to share something of that same feeling.