About

I rarely begin with a clearly formulated question. More often, something in the visible world holds my attention before I understand why. I may already know that I want to work, or have an idea that has not yet found its form, but I do not know the image in advance. I look until something offers a way forward — a structure, a movement, a relationship between forms, a patch of light. The world suggests; the artist selects. Only then does the question begin to take shape.
From that point, direct observation is no longer a set of instructions. The centre of attention has to move from the subject onto the sheet, and the image has to begin working on its own. I change scale, move figures, remove or add details, and sometimes rely on memory rather than the original view. A work succeeds for me when the reason I stopped to look has moved from the world onto the sheet strongly enough for someone else to encounter it there.
I want the work to make the question visible. My image is one possible answer; the viewer does not have to arrive at the same one. This is partly why exhibitions and publications matter to me: they let me test whether someone else can see what made me stop, even if they understand it differently. Sometimes a viewer’s response makes me look again at a work I had thought was finished.

I came to art with habits formed elsewhere. My first professional field was mathematics. I loved the beauty of a good solution: an unexpected step, a clear structure, a difficult problem suddenly becoming simpler. Later, years of work with drawing tests taught me to look closely at line, placement, scale, detail, pressure, rhythm, and the order in which a drawing was made. When I began studying art systematically, that habit of analysis found a different use. I learned to set an artistic task, compare sketches, change the format or technique, and treat an unsuccessful work as a problem that could be understood and sometimes solved.