Each painting invents its own style, its own vocabulary. Any style of painting I have painted or studied (since I was four), I’ll use to engender the experience. I see myself at times fusing DeKooning’s paint with Tintoretto’s composition, Velasquez’s structure with a Chinese calligrapher’s kinesthetic brush stroke or Ingres’ line swimming in Rothko’s color.

Years of figure drawing and dancing help me find that there is a language in the body that can tell a story visually. I watch Paul Taylor’s dances draw and David Smith’s drawings dance. Years of acting helps me find the specific breath of life that color breathes into an experience.

Hopefully, the visual equivalent or painting engenders the essence of the experience so that it is no longer bonded to the objects surrounding it and the sensual is free to serve the spiritual and the painting serves the viewer.

- James Kiberd