Why I Never Chose One Style

People ask what my style is. I understand why. Categories are useful. They help people know what they’re looking at, what shelf to put you on. Surrealist. Abstract. Expressionist. I’ve heard all of these used about my work and none of them feel wrong exactly. They just don’t feel complete.

The truth is I don’t have a style and I’ve made peace with that. More than peace — I’ve come to think it’s the most honest thing about the way I work.

Here’s the thing about fixing a style: it stops the learning. The moment you have a signature — a recognisable move, a formula that works — you start repeating it. And repetition is comfortable. It’s also the beginning of the end of curiosity. I’ve seen it happen. You do something that gets a response and then you do it again, slightly differently, forever. The work becomes a product of itself.

A style is a conclusion. I’m not interested in conclusions. I’m interested in what happens next.

I want to unlearn as much as I learn. Genuinely. I want to walk into the studio and not know what I’m going to make. I want to pick up a brush and be surprised by what comes out. That can’t happen if I’ve already decided who I am as a painter.

Music works the same way for me. I play guitar and ukulele not because I’m building toward something — toward a performance, a recording, a style. I play because each time is different. Different mood, different tempo, different notes finding each other. The joy is in the finding, not in the having found.

Freedom in art isn’t the absence of discipline. It’s what discipline eventually makes possible. You put in the years with the brush so that one day you don’t have to think about the brush at all. Then you’re free to think about everything else — or nothing. And nothing is often where the best things come from.

So I roam. Big canvases when I need space to move. Small works when something is precise and fragile. Oil when I want slowness and depth. Acrylic when the idea is urgent and won’t wait. Each new painting gets to be whatever it needs to be. Not what I am. Not what I’ve been. What it needs.

I don’t want to look back at a thousand paintings and see the same painting made a thousand times. I want to see a thousand different paintings made by someone who never stopped being curious about what the next one might be.

Acrylic on canvas — each work begins without a plan

Studio wall — multiple works in progress simultaneously