Extrusions of bubble gum flavoured ice creams and pastel sherbets weave looping pathways through frogspawn. Worms wriggle around currant-dotted buns. Light filters through floating discs of half-sucked candy.

Colours overlap, interrupt, and separate like an intricate choreography.

Pigment bound by oil and resin, smeared, stained, splattered over canvas or wood—painting is the evolution of a primal activity that humans have used to illustrate our fears and desires.

Intricacies, my latest series of paintings, is a serendipitous and reverent salute to pigment and brush. The process can be a painful expurgation one moment and a joyous arrival to visual autonomy the next. Pre-planning is minimal. Disorganized meanderings need to become orderly—there is always tension, never a complete resolution. There are no certainties; this allows for the distillation of the colours without becoming too pure and rigid in form. The whimsical curving, twisting pathways across the surface invite a pleasurable response: there is hope beyond despair, resurrection through decay.

The act of making an abstract painting is one of liberation. To be freed from subject matter, the narrative window, the moment caught and rendered, provides the permission required, essential, to honour the materiality of paint—which, while it is nothing more than pigment emulsified in a medium and applied to a flat surface, is the vehicle for a series of complex, interlinked relationships: colour, line, shape, texture. Physical mitigates the metaphysical; paint, despite its chthonic origins, is a vehicle to other realms. This process allows me to cross the teleological path of modernist abstraction without the existential angst that might easily catch a painter up these days