My interest as a painter is in the origin of painting, in the history and development of techniques and forms, and in the unbroken historical continuity of painting as bodily practice. Painting is not primarily a theoretical or an intellectual discourse, it is primarily a bodily meditation on Being. That is, it is physical and sensual by its very Nature. This original nature existed long before Thought.

It has often been held that Painting is a narrative art, but this is just a conceit. Painting is only narrative if the viewer already knows the story, or if the story is being explained to the viewer, in words, at time of viewing. “Narrative Painting” can only illustrate something already known. Although painting has often been representational, her representations are not narratives. The experience represented in traditional painting is symbolic and/or allegorical experience, but painting is deeper than mere representation.

My interest as a painter is in the origin of painting in caves, in the history and development of techniques and forms, and in the unbroken historical continuity of painting as a bodily practice.

In his Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Romantic poet John Keats famously writes that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. In The Origin of the Work of Art, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the nature of the relationship between Truth and Beauty. Heidegger says that “Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is” and that Beauty is the appearance of Truth in the work of art. Since Truth is the revealing of itself, the arising of Truth and Beauty is not a fixed matter of fact, but rather a process or an opening. I relate this opening to the way in which Heidegger defines the word phenomenon in his central text Being and Time: