work (Coloured)

My work stems from a childhood spent in a small town in the Western Transvaal, South Africa, a place of vast hypnotic space and magnificent landscape. 

The small multi-cultural White population, far from their own roots, seemed unaware of living in a Continent of thousands of years of Art History, and amongst Mankind's oldest living inhabitants - the San Bushmen.

When, as a young adult, I emigrated to the United Kingdom, I had, like my Lithuanian parents before me, to reinvent myself in a strange new culture.

It took some years for me to understand the need, in my paintings, to return to my roots. I found my influences then changing to Ancient Arts and those Arts made specifically for religious or magical purposes.

An important recent influence on my work has been that of San Rock Art.

Working from reproductions of their paintings has demonstrated to me that the San understood form through movement. This results perhaps not only from their knowledge, as hunters, of animal movement, but also from their close association with Nature.

Their images were made in trance-state, bringing them ever closer to a Supernatural element.

This powerful community of daily life, religion, and art, connects with a fundamental thinking, one in which here are no opposites, only interdependence. San Art therefore, thousands of years away from me and far from their perceptions and values, speaks to me on a profound level.

My work is impelled by movement. Movement = breath = life.

In these changing and turbulent times, I reach out as much as ever to that ancient art which accords with the innermost depths of my being. 

I am, however, a modern Dadaist. Dada was a term coined after the 1st  World War when trust was lost in leadership and the word Dada was used as a nonsensical one.