Every winter I do a kind of walkabout in my studio. 

When I start to get a glimmer of what this work is about, then I can start to figure out how to say what I think it is saying. I never really know about my work. There are layers I understand, and deeper ones I do not touch. After all these years I have come to realize that there is a dangerous place in one's work where it does not pay to meddle. There is a dark magic there that cannot be revealed through words, through analysis, only honoured. Respected. I know when it is there. Sometimes a painting has it right from the start, and it is my job to enrich it. Sometimes it is very hard won indeed. The fact that my work, for all it's abstraction, is intimately tied to my moods and experiences is a conundrum deeply confounding and confusing to me. I'd like to know myself but this is a river I cannot swim. I paint to figure it out as far as that is possible, but it is Pandora's box. I hang on to the threads that make sense and let go of the ones that will pull me into somewhere I don't need to find myself. The whole process is a kind of faith thing. A trust that it will all, if not make sense exactly, at least hang together in a functional way. It is a provisional life.