There are certain times when a painting accelerates beyond you, and you have to try and understand and catch up with it.

There are certain times when a painting accelerates beyond you, and you have to try and understand and catch up with it.

I'm a quiet person, I'm not a flashy art world person. I'm in the studio in the middle of nowhere. There's sheep and fields. The work has to be authentic in that way.

I felt like I had reached the end of a period of life, where the work was jumping about and pushing something new every time. I wanted to dial it back and create a language that was stable and deep.

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.

Small thoughts grow into a picture. It may suggest an individual or it may suggest a place, but generally the painting's job is to work that [idea] into an abstract proposition that is completely removed from the starting point.

What really surprised me was how strange my paintings are anyway. To me, it's like, "Let's paint some portraits and some objects. Don't make it weird, just make it dead straight," but it's still weird. I don't know why. I guess it's just the way I see things.