The gene is the fundamental building block of life, its only purpose is to replicate. But with replication it mutates and through natural selection life evolves.

The GENE MEME paintings are themselves replications and mutations. The subject evolves from one painting to the next. Some of them feel like paintings of simple organisms that you might see in a petri dish, or single cells dividing and multiplying. Others appear to be abstract crowds of people - sophisticated and complex, but still with a basic mission to replicate and spread, to fill the canvas.

On a deeper level, the way they are painted captures something of the essence of life. Opaque, textured under-paintings are overlaid with transparent films of glaze that create the sense of skeletal structures, membranes and skins. This progressive layering of paint is used to introduce a sense of randomness; the randomness that characterises the mutation of genes. The paint is applied in contrasting layers using tools that are difficult to control, palette knives, brush handles, hands. This produces unexpected combinations, giving the paintings a sense of the complexity and diversity of life.

The layers dry quickly and so the painting is a battle in which the characteristics of the paint are continually changing and a coherent and harmonious whole must be achieved before the image coalesces, like life, on the canvas.