As a poet, I have tried to stretch my tendency to be orderly, to move from tighter to looser, from familiar to surprising. My experience as a painter is the opposite. My experience of painting is always one of surprise, of looseness, of disorder, and my effort as a painting develops, is to find or perhaps impose some structure, some order.

My paintings are non-representational, they do not begin with any attempt to portray anything in the physical world, although they sometimes surprise me by doing so, albeit loosely. Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I hope my delighted surprise as a painter might offer something similar to the viewer.