Artist’s Statement

“Clear White” in the English translation of Bán Glan from the Irish. This series along with Lonrach Dubh, is in part the result of the environment in which we all find ourselves in this tumultuous year 2020. The issues that the pandemic has brought forward: the race relations that we thought were moving towards a more humanistic resolve, have in fact diminished; the climate decline, which had seemed to be turning around, has worsened; all of these have come to a head in my meditations while working in the studio. I began to think in terms of black and white as a metaphor for not just the distillation of racial thinking, but of the way in which most people see the world. We have fallen into living with the widening gap between the right and the left politically, the attitude of the “end justifying the means at any cost.” Clearly, abstract paintings in black and white are not going to change the way people think, but they may have some small part in the healing that we need, the acceptance of each other that is required.