the practice
My work emerges from three interwoven foundations.
They are not theories imposed on the paintings — they are what the paintings grew from.
Together they form the practice.
The gentle insistence that slowness, tenderness, and presence are a form of resistance.
I — soft rebellion
We live inside systems designed to extract — attention, data, energy, time. The pace is not neutral. It is an architecture. And most of us, most of the time, move at its speed without choosing to.
Soft Rebellion is the decision to move differently. Not through confrontation or spectacle, but through the quiet insistence that another way of being is possible — and that practising it matters.
The words hold the tension. Soft: yielding, tender, gentle. Rebellion: to refuse, to resist, to push back. Together they form a productive contradiction — a yielding that doesn't give ground, a gentleness that nonetheless reshapes things.
In the paintings, this appears as a refusal of instant resolution. The forms don't settle. The colours negotiate rather than assert. To look at the work slowly is already to practise something — a different relationship with time, with ambiguity, with the act of seeing itself.
In a culture that profits from overwhelm and disconnection, choosing to slow down is not just a personal preference. It is a cultural intervention. A quiet revolution practised one moment of attention at a time.
A cosmology where matter is fluid, intelligent, and alive — and where clarity and cloudiness are states we move through, not problems to solve.
II — mystery of water
I've kayaked out beyond Muckle Flugga, past the tiny island of Outstack, to the northernmost point of Britain — and then a little further, into open sea. At that point water is not a backdrop. It is the entire condition of your existence. It holds you, moves you, resists you, and could take you at any moment. There is no metaphor more immediate than that.
Water has been the deepest influence on this practice — not as symbol but as substance. As a model for how matter behaves when it is alive.
Water is the oldest presence in the work. It appears as cloudiness, as depth, as the darkness of an unseen floor. It stands for the substrate of experience — the place where chemistry becomes biology, where matter begins to organise itself into something that can eventually look back at itself and ask what it is. In this sense, water represents the consciousness of matter. It holds uncertainty, turbulence, and the slow movement of forms that have not yet become distinct. The layer of experience where things are more felt than named.
The same element also holds reflection and transparency. A still surface can reflect the world with precision. In the paintings, this appears as sudden sharpness emerging from a field of blur — the sense that something has come into focus without fully solidifying.
Clarity and cloudiness are not opposites to be chosen between. They are states we move through. The paintings often sit between them: edges dissolve then reappear, forms emerge then sink back into the field. The viewer is invited to feel this movement rather than resolve it.
To live with water as a model is to accept that experience will sometimes be murky, sometimes sharp, and often both at once. The work does not offer resolution. It offers a way of being with changing states of perception without demanding that anything be permanent.
Confluence came from that open-water crossing — sea all around, land left behind. The warm ground beneath cold blue forms, something fluid and alive moving through the frame.
A framework for noticing how you are seeing, not just what you see.
III — transpectivism
We tend to imagine that perception begins with awareness — that we simply look out and see what is there. But beneath every moment of seeing lie invisible frames of context — some ancient, some immediate, all shaping what we notice before we have the chance to choose.
They are there in the mood you bring to a room, the associations a colour carries, the stories you tell yourself. They are there in the light, the people around you, the last thing you read. Seeing is never just looking. It is always looking from somewhere.
These frames move before we do. They decide what feels obvious, what feels strange, what feels impossible — and they do all of this before we have the chance to question them.
Transpectivism is the practice of turning awareness toward those frames.
It is not about replacing one worldview with another. It is about noticing that we are always inside a worldview. The shift is from I see the world to I see the way I am seeing the world — and from there, asking: how am I shaping what I see? It is turning perception into a question rather than a certainty.
I couldn't find a genre or a word for what I was doing in the paintings, so I invented one. Transpective comes from the Latin trans — across, through, beyond — and specere, to look. Looking across perspectives. Looking through them. Transpectivism names not just a personal practice but a proposed category — a way of describing what certain art does and what certain ways of seeing make possible, in the way Cubism named something that exceeded any single painter.
The paintings are built around multistability: the way a form can shift depending on where you focus, how close you stand, what mood you bring. Different things become visible at different distances. The meaning is not fixed in the canvas. It arises in the encounter between the painting and the person looking.
This is also like the effect of changing light on a landscape. Adjust the angle of illumination and different features emerge — some pulled into sharp relief, others cast into shadow. Nothing in the landscape has moved. What has changed is the light. In the same way, a shift in attention, mood, or context can make an entirely different painting visible within the same canvas. Transpection is the act of looking in this way, and is never neutral. It is always a form of illumination, and what you illuminate is shaped by where you stand and what you bring.
The deepest transpective experience is difficult to describe in language, because language is a frame itself, but it is the moment when you are aware of noticing that you are experiencing your own existence — not thinking about it, but watching the thinking happen. A stillness beneath interpretation. I cannot know whether anyone else has this experience exactly, because it is entirely subjective. But I trust it is a universal human capacity. And I trust paintings can sometimes point toward it.
Transpectivism is not a theory to adopt. It is a way of living with the knowledge that perception is always partial, always framed, always in motion — and finding in that not anxiety but a certain lightness. A softer grip on certainty. A more generous reading of others. A quieter relationship with your own conclusions.
The paintings ask you to linger in ambiguity, to notice your own interpretations as they arise, and to recognise that looking is never neutral. In that recognition, a small freedom appears: the freedom to see your own seeing, and to let it change.
Riot of Spring is where this begins — a field of unresolved potentials, warm and cool tones trading places, no form settling into finality. A surface that changes as you move through it.
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