I am concerned with symbolism. I begin with an image and then explore it, sensually, intuitively and then intellectually. Take the image of the face for instance. The face is arguably the most significant part of the person. It is through my face that others know me - yet I can never truly see my own face. I can only see it distorted in a mirror or frozen in time in a photograph. I have many faces at the tips of my fingers - my husband’s, my child’s, my friends’ - I can conjure them up at will and see them with my mind’s eye, yet I cannot imagine my own face. As such the face is not ‘me’, it is more like a living mask, one that is constantly readjusted to express me, for the benefit of others to understand and know me. My face is a symbol of me. And just as a living person is in constant flux so is the symbol that expresses him/her.

When I paint a face I begin with treating it like a landscape, I see colours, shapes and lines – no person. In this intuition-driven process there comes a moment when a person appears on the canvas and takes on a life of his/her own. This is the moment when my dominant focus switches from the model to the person on the canvas. The face on the canvas becomes an anchor point, a still, secure point in an environment in flux. The image on the canvas becomes a symbol in its own right, yet not only of the person I am painting but also of me. This is so by necessity because the face is already an abstraction of the person’s true being and by painting I am abstracting yet again. My abstraction onto canvas is done through my senses, my intuition and my intellect and thus the image also becomes a symbol of some aspect of myself.

The portrait becomes a vessel for the unconscious, it can become a symbol of anyone who looks at it. Like a fairy tale the picture provides a space to see the darkness and those hopes and wishes that tear us apart because they are far beyond our reach. We can project stories unto the faces of these people we do not know. We imagine who they are, we imagine what they might think, feel, dream. These stories are our own hidden stories and we do not realise that they are about ourselves. The unknown faces have become symbols of ourselves, they have become mirrors of our own unconscious, like dreams.