Artist's Statement
The themes of asylum and immigration are political. As an artist, I try not to work with any party political agenda because I fully comprehend the complexities of the practical problems that society has to deal with concerning this subject. However, as a human being, it concerns me that we are all too often ready to take part in the debate about numbers and statistics, with insufficient awareness of the root causes behind the human dilemmas in any given situation. It becomes so much easier to meet targets and goals to support rhetoric when you have not allowed yourself to be distracted by empathy.
I see my role as a painter as a struggle via my artistic process to stay connected to my own empathetically related responses to the world around me. Hopefully, when I share the resulting imagery with my audiences, my visual expressions of solidarity with the indignity and suffering experienced by many will touch people in such a way that they will understand far more about my feelings for the subject than my words could ever convey.
My paintings are fictional. They do not relate to specific people. The subjects of my work enter my consciousness much like the characters in a novel appear to an author. The world of our imagination is peopled by many seemingly 'real' acquaintances who have no actual substance other than the description of them created by another, yet they may be just as revealing to us about our own condition as many of the living people that we interact with. It is in this spirit that I construct my compositions. A paradox of artifice is that it can be constructed from a deeper truth than we are able to show during the 'reality' of our daily lives.
I make no apologies for the fact that the majority of my figures are male. In a conflict ridden world that is suffering from what many perceive as an explosion of male aggression, I feel that I often want to give expression to fraternal sympathies and to my masculine sensitivity, which can so often be overlooked by many sections of the media who are often too keen to stereotype for effect. This does not mean that I do not fully acknowledge the courage and bravery of the many women who are seeking asylum throughout the world, and I hope my images speak for and to them also.