For 30 years I have watched artists work, looked at great painters and bought and sold their work. For much of that time I have bottled a burning desire to be on the other side of the canvas, making my own art. Now I find myself painting again, and the influences although wider and more current, are oddly familiar. Despite myself I work spontaneously and wait and watch for the painting to tell me where to go next. Using techniques I have tried to formulate afresh, (I was a water color painter,) I find myself working first in acrylic washes, and then layering, building accidental surfaces so that I can excavate them again. Sometimes I build up the ground so that it can be filled with stains of color that when sanded holds its surface like frottage.

At some point I need to solidify, tighten, or structure the work, but each solution is unique, and the paintings tend to be individual.

For three years I focused on the 50 States of America in Plaid. Not the shape of the state, but the mood or the feeling it evokes based on its self-projection.

Loving sky, water and the place where they meet, is as much as an obsession as is my love for fabric, color, and the grid, all elements that are still looming large since my childhood in Johannesburg.