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.

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

The paintings don't exist outside themselves. There's no lead photograph off the internet or anything like that. It all comes from my mind and it's a bit like a little movie each time - how do I get the props, the setting, the time of day, the light, the action.

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

The paintings are kind of set in the past, present, and future all at once.

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

There are things that inform the works, but that doesn't go anywhere near what you're actually looking at.