Here you can see a painting develop from start to finish. Photographs taken after each painting session show often fitful progress and uneven development as I attempt to balance formal painting considerations with the task of trying to make sense of that which I behold. What I behold is, of course, the product of my own hand.

It's a narcissistic process. Yet I believe if I can make the end product make sense to me it will also make sense to you - well, maybe not everybody, but many of you.

What sense? Just as when I speak, if I speak well, you understand. Communication: but that does not mean your understanding is exactly the same as mine. When William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet's famous soliloquy "To be, or not to be; that is the question: ..." he laid out something which generation after generation has understood as profound. But try to find two people who agree on its meaning. Ambiguity and uncertainty do not detract from our conviction that something important was said, though.

It is this aspect of Art as a medium of communication that interests me, that I set out to explore. That is the ultimate goal through all the various twists and turns in the development of the artworks below: to establish that mysterious and elusive communication, that 'inarticulable' common understanding. We can have different views on the meaning, yet we can agree to a surprising extent that something is or isn't meaningful and even that some things are more meaningful than others.

So what is the communication that has taken place and how did it happen?