For me painting is a meditation, a spiritual practice where the goal isn’t to manifest the finished piece or to express what the ego feels at a particular moment, but to get into an expanded state of consciousness where a deeper creative force can freely work through me. The direct experience of the timeless, effortless, selfless flow-state is it’s own reward and more than enough to motivate the creative process, regardless of what artifacts come out of it. 

Painting this way is much more interesting to me because I really have no idea how the painting is going to turn out and every session is an exploration, When I surrender to the flow state and just watch my hand paint out these forms I often surprise myself with what emerges. It’s humbling to realise that the best thing I can do for the process is to get out of the way, the more I trust and surrender control, the better it seems to turn out.  

I hope that my work will affirm the experiences of those who have directly encountered these expanded states of mind, and serve as a reminder that life is stranger than we can imagine and there is so much more going on in our minds than we are aware of moment to moment. The problem is when we think that we know everything, what doesn’t fit into our model of the world is filtered out before it reaches our awareness and life stagnates. To remedy this we must be able to tolerate ambiguity and not be afraid to put ourselves into a humble open vulnerable state where the mysterious magic of life is once again allowed to shine through.