I have never shied away from the big existential issues - death, politics, religion - and indeed, I brazenly wrestle them onto the canvas. The most dramatic or kitschiest imagery takes a back seat to getting pigment down on a surface in a diversity of techniques. I am a painter's painter, whose trajectory has taken me from the gothic, slacker, grunge South Island art scene to Berlin, where I drank deeply from echoes of German post-war, neo-expressionist painting.