Category: Art and Creative Practise

From early surreal scenes to Oneiric Divide: why I want to paint the feelings a dream leaves behind, rather than retell its story.

More than twenty drawings explore what happens when I work in complete darkness. With visual control removed, familiar poses become distorted or fragmented. Charcoal, pen and ink studies trace the relationship between academic drawing, gesture and unexpected form.

Exhibitions and frustrating dealings with the art world bring me back to the studio. Two paintings follow the idea of passage: one through the energy of rock music, another through the memory of an Egyptian wall painting.

While recovering from illness in October 2023, I returned to an old Beijing portrait, explored variations of a young monk and made an untitled sequence in response to troubling news. The experiments use graphics software and AI-assisted processing.

Two tentative studies explore my unease about environmental destruction, through divided landscapes, shifting perspectives and a darker variation on Poetry from the Sky.

Before a Red Sea diving trip, abstract studies lead me to a question about painting: what changes when I imagine a horizon behind me as well as in front?

The ginkgo outside my house turns the meadow gold in autumn. These studies follow leaves into winter, through veils of pale paint, towards the first thought of spring.

During a winter low, I pick up my brush and see what comes. These paintings trace the movement from dark, heavy forms towards more playful calligraphic marks and openings of light.

The fifth painting in a new series brings calligraphic forms into a landscape-like space. A few thoughts on its pink line, its sense of distance, and the opposing qualities I want to hold together.

The Dreamweaver’s Daughters and Wolf Hour approach the uncertain space between sleeping and waking. Two abstract ink paintings in which forms emerge, combine and dissolve without settling into a single scene.

Two piles of unfinished paintings, a few life-saving brushstrokes and a Jethro Tull joke. Alongside the rescued works: new bookmarks and notes from July 2022.

One painting this time: Rheingold combines the atmosphere of my dream sequences with Chinese calligraphy and early thoughts on translating Wagner’s musical ideas into painting.

A leaf becomes a wing; a scene in water becomes uncertain; a near-photographic surface resists description. Three final paintings explore the shifting boundary between recognition and abstraction.

Can a painted form be a fish and not quite a fish? Morning and night in my metaverse open questions about recognition, ambiguity and the different inspirations I find in Zen and Schrödinger’s cat.

Feininger, the light inside the Sagrada Família and a view from beneath the ice: three paintings and the associations behind them.

Surrealism entered my work through literature. It later met Chinese painting and calligraphy, and still shapes my questions about intention, chance and emerging images.

Two directions into one landscape: a calm blue distance above and a restless depth below. A compositional experiment that also became a reflection on the environment.

A conversation with a fellow painter raises a question: does explaining my work reveal too much, or can a few words open another way of looking?

A painterly big bang: light, colour and form finding their place. Notes from 2021 on a small series of unfinished abstract landscapes.