I have always been interested in outside influence in my work. Bringing in something to react to or deal with. Something outside my control. When I was a student I used to go to the hardware store and buy mistints. I would then return to my studio and paint with whatever paint they had there. The choice of colour was removed. Greens, pinks, browns, yellows. Colours I would not normally use in my work. A lot of the time colours that would not necessarily go together or colours that were not what one should put together. I created a problem of making a painting work while removing personal choice. Artists have always selected colour, image and content based on the personal. Removing some or all of that has been something I have always been interested in and it is something that has reoccurred throughout my career. Taking my personal choice out of the equation to different extents. With the Dowsing Rod series I have fully embraced this and found my work going in directions it would not go if I had relied on the personal alone. Monet chose to paint hay stacks. I remember deKooning talking about how it was not a brilliant idea to paint hay stacks. This got me thinking about the choices we make as painters and how we come to the conclusions we do. My interest to remove some of my choice has taken my art in directions that are not the personal. I have said before that where my hand would naturally go left the dowsing rod went right. This is not the accidental. I am then left to react to the mark made and this can be difficult when the eye is involved. After years and years of studying Art History and the story of painting we are very aware of the ladder of Art. Why one artist sits at a certain level and another either higher or lower.
 Francis Bacon's work had the accidental or as he would say the total removal of the accidental. Paint was left to do what it would but there was still the personal in that the image could either be destroyed or reworked until it met with the approval of the artist eye. Is art good if the artist eye is removed? To what extent can we remove the artists eye and it still be good? Or still be art? Can the artist leave a picture unfinished or off balance? How can the artist resist the temptation to correct? Will it be seen as the artist not getting this one right? Or is the off balance piece the strongest of all? The most true of all? The most honest of all? In my latest body of work there is one piece in particular that embraces this notion. The work is off balance and not quite right. It for me is a direction that is both risky and at the same time one that is taking my work to a new level.