I currently work almost exclusively on paper, using a resist of some sort (linseed oil, wax, oil pastel etc) in combination with watercolour, acrylics and occasionally other materials such as graphite and clay. The way in which these materials embrace or reject one another acts as a metaphor for human interaction and reflects some of the themes I am exploring as an artist.

In my recent work I have been trying to describe the particular significance I see in people, events, and their relationship to the passage of time. These events are often very simple and mundane, and the people involved are the passengers on any underground train passing beneath the streets. Yet they are nevertheless sacred and I feel a sense of wonder towards them. They inhabit the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" which, late in life, the poet W.B. Yeats finally accepted as the ultimate source of his inspiration.

I use my images as a means of visiting the past, the future and (perhaps impossibly) the present in search of human experiences which are both widely shared and highly personal. Although titles such as "My First Birthday" and "My Grandchildren and a Chair" are in some ways autobiographical, I of course remember nothing of the f irst event, nor do I have photographs of it; as to the second, it may never happen. The pictures are therefore as much about Everyman as about myself. In the same way the parents, children, grandchildren, uncles and cousins who populate my work are part of a family which both includes and extends far beyond my own.

Holy Man Mixed media

Whatever these people may be doing - waiting for a train, flying a kite or just lying asleep - they seem to me to be in the very act of making myth. They are participating in a process whereby their thoughts, emotions, actions and experiences - both good and evil - are laid down, one upon the other, layer upon layer, so that they may be mined by future generations as
a source of spiritual heat and light - or of discord and destruction.
I am intensely aware of a divine intelligence who is the architect of this process, though this is no vague, abstract concept, but a very personal and immediate relationship. Some might argue that it is because I have this belief that I have come to interpret the world in such a way. The fact is, though, that I have always seen the world in this way and it is my sense of its
sacredness which has become ever stronger. Although it may not be immediately obvious from the subject matter of these pictures, the insights and personal perspectives I have gained from my work in and about Africa have also had a profound effect on the way I see the world.