Why return to the same image? Why make another version when one already exists?
The answer is that repetition is not duplication. It is a method of discovery.
Each work begins where the previous one ended. The image may appear familiar, but neither the artist nor the world remain unchanged. Time alters perception. Experience accumulates. Materials behave differently. New relationships emerge. Every return becomes another encounter.
I do not repeat an image because I believe it has been exhausted. I repeat it because I know it has not.
The paintings are not attempts to arrive at a definitive version. They resist completion. Instead they record an ongoing conversation between memory, material, process and time. Every layer carries traces of those that came before, just as every thought carries echoes of previous experience.
Repetition slows looking. It asks both artist and viewer to notice difference where familiarity first suggests sameness. Small shifts become significant. A gesture, a mark, a colour or a fragment of transferred imagery begins to change the meaning of everything around it.
There is an alchemical element to this process. Images are broken down, transferred, stained, buried, washed, scraped, altered and returned to the surface. The act of making becomes a kind of cleansing: not a purification that removes history, but a process that allows the image to pass through matter and emerge changed.
In this repeated handling, images begin to slip. Their meanings loosen. A sign no longer points in only one direction. It gathers associations, loses certainty, becomes unstable. The semiotics of the image are not fixed but made active through process, accident and return.
These works are not about reproducing an image. They are about testing it. Returning to it. Living with it long enough for it to reveal something that could not be seen the first time.
The process remains empirical. I work through making rather than illustration. Meaning is not imposed upon the work in advance but discovered through the act of painting itself. The studio becomes a place where attention is practised and uncertainty is welcomed.
Repetition is therefore neither routine nor habit. It is an acknowledgement that understanding is never complete. Every painting is provisional. Every conclusion opens the possibility of another beginning.
There is no final version.
Only the next encounter.