The paintings below have all been created in the last four years following a diagnosis if Parkinson’s disease that I received in 2020. I used to paint and make music in my early and mid 20’s (about 30 years ago) but for various reasons I more or less abandoned ‘art’ in favour of what I considered to be more important pursuits. This has all changed following the diagnosis and I have now returned to painting and music-making again. Most of my recent paintings are largish (about 1.5 – 2M) portrait-like images of imaginary figures that are linked in some way to the biographical and other therapy related work that I have been engaged in over the past four years. One of the themes that I am exploring is how subtle, minute changes in a face can alter our impression of who is there. By working with a combination of intentional drawing and painting and accidental/random processes, such as leaving the painting out in the rain, or washing it with a sponge and hose, I invite a character to emerge gradually over various iterations and transformations of the image. Sometimes these destructive interventions destroy the image completely, but mostly they enable new features to emerge that make the figure more interesting. Sometimes I have a picture or intention of who the figure is, and sometimes I only gradually find out as I go along. My aim is to work on the image until I can feel a real substance or ‘presence’, as if there were a real person standing there, and I can begin to find out a little bit about who the person is. The paintings below are all examples of this process. They are mostly painted on paper using a combination of water colour, oil colour, pencils and crayons, and whatever else comes to hand. I also often use cut-ups and collage.