I am an observer and a recorder, perhaps, a subtle commentator, on experience. I am not a rigorous analyst. I not one for shoe-horning the mystery of reality into categories, into an all embracing schema for the world, even if that schema is one that claims to deny that is what it is doing. What is, IS and I question whether our efforts to master it, to lay down what and how it is, and what it isn’t are not doomed from the start. I am an impressionist- into senses, not exact structures. Feelings over rigorous explanations and attempts at exact description. I know the world as what I sense it to be. My sense of how it SHOULD be. That sense carries more weight to me than any detailed, intricately worked out analysis.

This is my approach to art. I paint on instinct, a feeling for what looks and feels right, what “works” and what doesn’t. Some intelligence underlies that, to be sure. Knowledge I have absorbed intellectually about design, composition, contrast, and colour. But if I think too much about those things while painting, my art suffers. Such information works best in the background, feeding itself unconsciously into my aesthetic sense.

This is also, naturally, how I prefer to approach others' art. I want to experience it, let it wash over me, and draw my impressions from that, not from rigorous examination of technique or of the ideas supposedly represented. I am interested in what art, literature, architecture, or film, even religion, makes me feel.

This is why the approach school makes me take to, say, Shakespeare, feels like violence.

Forcing one’s will upon it, invading it and plundering it in search of “what it means” or “what I can get out of it”. Literature, art, as yet another commodity, another resource to exploited and “developed” by man until whatever beauty it once possessed is obscured by viewing platforms, casinos and tourist hotels, mining operations and oil rigs.

Is such a reservation just an idealistic excuse for intellectual laziness?

I don’t know. But the activity of school as I am experiencing it feels increasingly invasive and unnatural. I have increasing difficulty imagining making a life of it.