Gallery 1 - Early Work

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- Crocus Roulette
- Nightbloom
- Still Life #2
- Still Life #3
- The Love Of Others
- With Mug Over Heart

These works painted in New York between 1990 and 1991 can be broken down into two series: Dyptychs and Small Interiors. These are some words I wrote at the time.

The diptych, or double painting, is the simplest juxtaposition to explore the way in which images counterpoint each other, to examine the stories and relationships they create, The mysteries of the familiar are at the heart of this work - the unknowable that surrounds us all just beyond the edge of our private mythologies.

I attempted to connect my work to its audience through the physical immediacy of high realism, drama and thick paint. This tangible physicality is a lie, for the world is a place of doubt and unknowing. I wish to indicate the chaos, mystery and silence at the heart of human relations.

The Small Interiors formed part of a series of twelve small works with couples. I have always been drawn to the fleeting glimpses of other people's lives seen through brightly lit windows at dusk as I pass by in a car or train. These people are so small and vulnerable against the darkening world. Likewise, these paintings give glimpses of private moments, difficult moments, frozen pauses between the words. I have found that this awkward immobility of two people is more eloquent than all the gestures and words we usually witness.

While I feel that the proximity of America perhaps gave the works unconcious references to Edward Hopper's paintings, I find myself returning to Breughel for the clumsy shapes of humanity, and Piero della Francesca for the quietly monumental figure. Yet it's surely not the stillness of religious illumination and surety that I am looking for. On the contrary, I find the monumental stillness of doubt.

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