The title of this exhibition is an attempt to set the stage for the intention from which the paintings emerge. It is how I see the activity of painting, as an altered state of perception. T S Elliot described it as “each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate”; similarly Seamus Heaney articulates beautifully the process, “the crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or as a phrase”.