Acrylic on Canvas, 12 x 9 in, 2019
 
The universe is not something that exists outside of us. There is not a binary opposite between it outside and ‘I’ inside. We are a happening of the universe in the same way that the formation of the sun is a happening of the universe and we are connected entirely with every other happening, every chemical, organism, tide, weather system, star, and galaxy, all of which has a beginning and an end and has its finite place in time.
You and I are bound to everything within our field of vision by the eye and technology allows us to expand our field of vision such that now we have seen (an image of) the bottom of the ocean, the inside of a cell, the retraction of glaciers, the location of the earth in space from 6 billion kilometres away. Never before have we, the human race, been able to see so much, and our field of vision will only broaden as our technology advances. But the problem of vision is that we are always seeing. In fact we see so much and so constantly that sight stops us from seeing. So, art reengages sight. It enables us to see with an intensity, a disruption, a meditation and a stillness, that art allows us to perceive things again by looking. It enables the encounter with what Alan Watt describes as the brilliant light of the cosmos in our every day experience.
Each act of painting is its own happening in the moment the paint is applied to the surface. One colour is allowed to interact with another, put against another, pulled through another, in a sort of unconscious interaction, which I try to tease out rather than force. The art happened in that moment of application and what you are looking at when you look at the painting object is not the art itself but a record of the art which happened in a moment which has now passed. This is the value of the painting as an object.
It is also my humble call to value nature.