I begin all my paintings with little idea of what I want.

There might be a colour I have in mind or a technique I’m curious to test out but more often than not I expect the inspiration to come later. For me the early layers serve as an open forum for spit firing ideas, chiseling out shapes and finding rhythms. From there I look for a unique structure. Ideally it feels familiar without actually being anything we can put words to. It’s tempting to shape it into something that makes sense but to me that defeats the whole purpose.

Sometimes I’m lucky and find what I’m looking for early on, other times it could take a matter of days. Regardless, the final product is usually a marriage of multiple layers that I’ve toiled with through blending, scraping, flinging paint — whatever feels right until something pleasing forms. I don’t know exactly what I want till I see it, and once I find the painting the easy part follows: the cleaning up, detailing, touch-ups and whisking in of new colours and textures.

My work is not meant to look like anything directly but rather loosely resemble landscapes, rivers, animals, faces or objects in similar fashion to how memory searches, picks out and presents them in a mishmash of indistinct form. I’m not hunting for anything specific nor trying to portray an emotion. That’s merely a side effect. Instead, I’m trying to put together something that almost lends itself into being. By letting instinct and just plain old “feel” be the guiding hand I hope for the result to be something free from what rational thinking might allow. I’m more interested in the accidental, the offbeat — the moments where one’s guard is down and the unconscious takes over, however fleeting that may be. It’s structure broken down into its barest parts, isolated and detached.

I paint in wavy lines which do a great deal in setting the tone of each piece. They coarse through networks of interconnected organic forms and textures that twirl and spiral out or into themselves. Like a colourful and eccentric neural network or nebula, there’s a bursting of ethereal forms and clouds floating about, all unified through countless paths and scenarios. My goal is to keep your eyes fixated on the canvas for as long as it takes you to if not find what you’re looking for, be transfixed by the strange jumble of notes and melodies and rhythms to the point where, lost for words you utter something weird like:

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. Woah.”