My pictures tackle a key genre of art, the still life. I enjoy the history, the tradition and the symbolic motifs. I select everyday items such as modest domestic utensils or pieces of fruit. My artwork is not about a contrived beauty or a realistic rendering of inanimate ‘things’ and not everything is pre-planned. I will start with a particular idea or image but it can go anywhere after that. My painting is a mixture of premeditation, improvisation and intuition. I rework, reorder, reorganize the pictorial space and therefore the paintings stray from their original source material as they are warped by memory, the paint itself and compositional demands. These familiar objects evolve within the arena of the picture space. As a result each painting is built up layer upon layer with paintings overlaid or retraced. There are paintings under paintings each containing hidden secrets. These fragments of paintings subtly influence subsequent layers but are themselves obscured in the process. I take a visual delight in making marks, deliberate and accidental – scraping, drawing, scratching, erasing or dribbling paint. I enjoy the contrast between the tight line of the pencil and the broad expanse of the brush. My paintings contain cryptic texts taken from diverse sources such as graffiti, music, TV, newspapers or conversations. These are partially erased to suggest further mysteries or perhaps represent the transience of the here and now.