Art
When people ask me, and people do, whether I paint the same person over and over again, I don't respond immediately. What does one say to hundreds of years of accumulated prejudice that has learned to look at my paintings and see the subject in the determinate shapes presented in them? Perhaps the least important ‘subjects' of my paintings are the stylized faces and figures I see in them. The faces are an obsession, a compulsion, mostly unconsciously produced. My subjects are far more vital, far more real than mere representations of a tenuous reality. When I compose (and I mean compose in the sense using the elements of vision to create an aesthetic artifact, much like a musician would use the elements of sound to create a fugue) I consciously manipulate a few chosen visual elements and these are in effect my subjects.

Most important amongst these are :
1) color, and here the notion of intensity and hue would be incorporated,
2) texture and pattern, these two elements being used as one compositional principle,
3) scale, which is sadly one of the most under-explored areas in the world of art and by which I mean not merely the size of the canvas but also the relative sizes of objects in it and
4) framing. I least consciously manipulate as a variational principle what is commonly thought of as subject. When I paint a human figure, the only interest it has for me as a human figure is the infinitude of expressive spatialities that inhere in it. The angles of the human body have no interest as ‘body language' or as any sort of intentional communicative texts. They are purely phatic. When there is such a wealth of expressive possibilities in the elements of visual difference, why dabble in the elements of visual meaning!

Art for me is creation under constraint, where the notion of economy of means is critical. And hence my experiments with single colors, with so-called ‘monochrome' works, though really, one only has to have eyes to see that there is no such thing as mono-chrome. For me Art is not a representation of Reality. It is creation. It is hubris. I compose; I don't paint from models. And yes art is about newness. Perhaps not absolute novelty given the intertextuality of existence, but of newness through permuting disparate essences—the newness of bricolage.