Painting is a form of Utopia - a place (the canvas itself) and a time (spent in making it) where the world has a chance to be perfect. The painting is here, but what is represented in it is distanced, twice removed.

For me, it was always the past, not the future that held most interest. The old is infinitely more mysterious than which is yet to come. Armed with love of history and with love of painterliness and color, I set out repeatedly to make the most exquisite visual statements I am capable of creating.

Modernist disdain for craftsmanship, beauty and nostalgia is always a challenge. In turn, I challenge it by indulging in precisely the same issues. Most of the images I work with are from the past - they strike me as mysterious, provoking and poignant. The combination of sweetness and latent ominousness is the best.

After the image has come, I proceed to treat it in paint in various ways. I play with the conceptual significance of not only the image, but also of what is done to the image. I contend with spatial issues of three dimensional space as well as with Modernist notion of flatness. Affirming, denying and again affirming are of great interest to me.

For me, painting is conceptually most interesting and the most difficult form of visual art today precisely because of its long history. Sometimes it is less troublesome to invent a new medium than it is to find uses for an old one.

My work is aiming to exist in the realm between passion and distancing.

Both are necessary.