I can only say that it is something that began in childhood, that I always seem to have been involved with it, and that none of the explanations such as environment, convenience, aptitude, etc., are adequate alone, for it is probably a complex amalgam of many such factors. However, I know definitely of the pleasure I had as a child in drawing and painting. I enjoyed for itself this activity of making marks and shapes and trying to reproduce the appearance of things on paper, and there was a strong urge to discover and improve. This is still the case and it has been a continuous process, but the pleasure has altered - it is no longer quite as direct but is now a mixture of pain, anger, fear, frustration, combined with pleasure and delight in the use of my materials. The sense of discovery is altogether a more diffuse and subtle experience. I arrive at the particular images and symbols which I use because at the time they seem essential. There is an inevitability about the forms and the nature of my painting which many may think is purely personal, egocentric or eccentric. I hope this is not the case. In a way, I paint because I am lost and painting is a means of finding myself. I use the work 'lost' to imply the condition of not knowing consciously the extent of oneself and that one's life is a type of search for meaning. Because one does not know, one is lost, being lost, one searches. The search takes me through territory covered by man since his first awareness of himself. His encounters, and mine, in this territory are things which have worried and obsessed him in infinite ways, and still do, and they are the subject matter of my painting, the informing spirit of my life. There are no definite answers, so my work is ambiguous. But I have also known the serenity of contemplation before nature - the wonders of the myriad forms and colours in a single flower, the vastness of the sky, the blinding light of the African sun, the gentle diffusion of that powdery-blue glow with its rich spectrum of colours that is the light of Europe. Mountains and the sea have both overpowered and entranced me, and sometimes left me numb with fear. I have also known the fear of the night, the dark, the power of tropical storms, the hatred and the love of man, the joy of creation, the despair of isolation and aloneness. These, too, are the subject matter of my paintings. Is all this far removed from 'Art?' I do not know, it is what I do, and it is not for me to attempt to assess it. So I face my work acutely aware of these aspects of being a man, of consciousness of self, of the conceptualised view of the world understood in terms of appetites, of the division of the whole into separate parts. In my painting I attempt the reconciliation of these opposites, to see for a while, no matter how vaguely, the whole.