Since I began painting in January 1994, several threads in painting and life have interested me much more passionately than most others. I love the idea of painting as a first draft. For me, that connects with Don Peebles' idea that he likes an artist to reveal the messiness of their research. I haven't developed many connections with so-called "representational" painting - The question in painting which most excites me is:  "What if colour has a life of its own?"

The first time I saw this question was in the following piece written by the French painter Sonia Delaunay in 1949. It reads:  "Up to the present, painting has been nothing but photography in colour, but the colour was always used as a means of describing something. Abstract art is a beginning towards freeing the old pictorial formula. But the real new painting will begin when people understand that colour has a life of its own, that the infinite combinations of colour have a poetry and a language much more expressive than the old methods. It is a mysterious language in tune with the vibrations, the life itself, of colour. In this area, there are new and infinite possibilities."

I find exploring these possibilities exhilarating.

I'm looking for soul connections - using colours which resonate and reverberate in my soul. Sometimes when I paint I like to simply compose a painting as you can see in "Three Flowers Seen Among Blues and Greens With A Leaping Orange Shemozzle".

On other occasions I like to begin a painting as a composition - then constantly interrupt it and improvise upon it as you can see in "My Ken Saro-Wiwa Painting."

I also like to pull ideas apart and put them together again differently. An example of that in my painting is "Sunset Under Alabaster Dolls", which I painted upside-down so I wouldn't be trying to control the effects I was getting.

So I'm looking to interrupt familiar patterns - mine - and those given by our inherited social contexts. I notice when I learn most, it's in painting.

Another thing I'm looking for is - have I done my job? My job's to re-enchant the world - to communicate freshness and wonder to the whole human family right now. As a painter, I stand for painting out of a spirit of wonder, of miracles in the making, and for the re-enchantment of our world.

My "job" as a painter is to create missions around painting which light people up. What I mean by that is that painting can both be about originality and technique and it can also be about making profoundly fundamental social and financial differences within each and every community those painters and their paintings serve.

For example, by selling my paintings and donating US$1million each to Amnesty International and the Mary Potter Hospice respectively - both those organisations then have more money to fund the next stage in their development, which in turn benefits our communities. So I'm committed to having painting help with all of that, as well as being original. Now that really lights me up!

My purpose is to create miracles in the making which light you up completely. It is like I am constantly asking you - what could I paint for you that would most inspire you today?