As a visual artist two streams run through my practice: my immersed experience of growing up in South Africa and my Eurocentric training in painting and drawing with its strong emphasis on the long history of development of art in the west. Both cultures speak to me, though many a time in different voices. I see the one as having a rich and highly evolved pictorial language, and the other to be filled with immediate energy, light and colour. These are the underlying driving forces that inform my work. Exploring the rich potential of paint is an ongoing enquiry that is never completely resolved - within each painting there arise new, open-ended possibilities for development. Colour awareness has been central throughout for me, and it is through that language that my work firstly finds expression. It establishes the overall mood to the paintings and is central to choice in subject matter and giving meaning, metaphorically, to the characters depicted. Image and colour have a close relation, determining the pictorial concerns that underpin the construction of my paintings. These determine the relationships between image and ground and the manner in which space is displaced. I see the figures as types and metaphoric constructs moving between periods of time and place. Recently I have returned to Early Renaissance work, and have felt inspired by the hitherto unevident confluence between the vivid colouring of that period and the intensity of Africa. In this I find diversity to be the origin of convergence.