My painting suggests a meaning at many levels, and this multi-layered quality, with its possibly contradictory styles, vocabularies, illusionistic and real characteristics, may possibly produce the enigmatic quality which, I think, there is in some of my work. The resolving into a state of unity of various elements which are in conflict - opposites - has been the overall dominant factor in my painting. I suspect as too limiting the simple solution of dealing only with single elements at a time. The actual confrontation of these disparate elements, and the failure or partial success of the resolving process, is central to my contention that Art has to have a mysterious and indefinable quality. Any art which can be completely subjected to an analytical process is, by this very fact, removed from the possibility of being Art. Art is precisely that condition which pertains when, after all analysis and reduction to parts has taken place, there remains a 'quality' which is more than the sum of those parts, which could not exist in any other form, and which cannot be caught, or held, or contained. The essence is that mercurial quality which always moves away at every attempt to touch it. I use abstract means to deal with this confrontation because such means are the least cluttered with extraneous interest - it is for me more essential. Yet I try to avoid singleness of purpose even when I have made this decision ... so that my work tends to be ambiguous. It seems to me that it is all too possible to achieve work which is merely visual.