I have experimented with oil painting, a medium with which I had previously developed some discomfort due to political ideas arising from Marxist approaches to the art market. I chose to work in the medium as a way of challenging my preconcepts, and as an experiment in challenging the self censorship which can occur through received ideas.

Starting with no agenda, just a choice of a colour, I created gestural marks on canvas, overlaying different colours, scratching back to underlying colours, creating non-figurative pieces which I considered to be a reflection of my mood, perhaps my subconscious state, perhaps from a spiritual base, though these ideas are not conveyed in any structured language.

A series of 16 canvases entitled "Paintings About Paint" (some of which are shown in the painting gallery - see link above) was made, each one 60cm x 60cm, the square reflecting the theme of containment which runs through much of my work. I worked on these until I felt they had arrived at a point of ‘balance,’ an intuitive decision. Some seemed to me like archaeological explorations of my own mind; I worked by intuitive dialogue with the pieces, gradually uncovering compositions which had relevance for me, though I could not rationally define this relevance. For me, they represent an idea of endless freedom within the constraint of the square canvases; the idea that freedom can exist in the mind regardless of the constraint of deterministic factors. In some of the paintings, I included short passages of scratching, reminiscent of handwriting, though no specific words are legible, referencing language as the subject itself, rather than the medium of expression, and arising from my belief that language is a determining factor in the way we understand the world. My working method in oil painting is an attempt to bypass this determining factor of language on my expression, by suspending the thought process in favour of emotive and intuitive gesture.