I paint the way some people keep a diary, as a way of finding out what I actually feel, rather than what I think I should feel.

Each piece is a mirror of my inner world at a particular moment: not a planned message, but something closer to a trace, left behind after the fact. I carry with me everything I learned in years of formal art education, composition, technique, colour, the quiet rules that make an image hold together, but I no longer approach painting as a discipline to master. It's an exploration. A form of play. A way through.

A lot of my process now starts with a question, often not my own. I ask the people close to me for a word, an image, a feeling, a prompt, and I let it lead me somewhere I wouldn't have gone on my own. It keeps the work honest. It keeps me from painting only what I already know how to paint.

If there's a single thread running through everything I make, it's love, feeling it, chasing it, missing itbeing it, hiding inside it, or feeling its absence. I paint out of love, and when love isn't there, I paint that too. Either way, what ends up on the canvas is real. That's the only rule I've kept.