I come from a long line of painters. My formative gallery encounters were in New York in the early 70s when painting and conceptual art battled for primacy and our gallery visits were constant. It was a saturation. My experience of painting has been subliminal, osmotic and decisive. The impact of growing up with abstract art across five decades, allowed me to view it from many standpoints and it took time to step out of the discipline of art writing to forge my own practice. I don't view abstraction as a genre, a Modernist convention or a historical inevitability. I see it as both a classical form and a transgression against the literal. I paint against description. Some part of my work wants to burn descriptive art to the ground. The work is deliberately non-objective, openly lyrical and tactile. I view occupying large spaces as an intervention.