Currently, I am exploring what I consider to be a style and approach to painting – to image making and image discovering – that falls within the “tradition” of prehistoric cave painting.   Among other things, it is thought that the cave painter’s subject matter was inspired, or implied, or inferred by the texture and pattern of the surface that s/he was painting.  A convexity might suggest the head of a bison or horse, and this specification would be “drawn” out.  I approach subject matter similarly, albeit drawing from a more varied cultural reservoir.

Walter Benjamin has noted that the cultural and technological products of the world, the so-called artificial world, can be conceptualized as something not opposed to nature, but as a second nature.  When painting, I begin with a relatively random mess of colors and values, creating an artificial cave wall on which I discover all sorts of entities from the various natures – images which, if the composition is successful, will be interacting among one another compositionally as well as thematically, inter alia.

In approaching that cave wall which is not simply canvas or wood but the limit of one’s consciousness, my intention is to encroach further into what may be termed the all-pervading mystery.  French theorist Alain Badiou defines Art as a means of approaching the Real (the Lacanian Real forever beyond reach), of finding symbols for the as yet un-symbolized beyond our comprehension.  To a certain degree, this jibes with my conception of cave painting.  Akin to a surrealism critical of its reifying tendencies, particularly Max Ernst’s oeuvre, the cave-painter explores the mystery, plunging into it as though diving into the sea of the mind, bringing back variously treasures, relics, or monsters.   Other notable influences on my work include Hieronymous Bosch and painters of illuminated manuscripts such as Jean Pucelle and  Kamal al-din Bihzad.

“ Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.”  Max Ernst