I've seen Paul’s painting practice veer in many directions; I would enter his studio, see a painting and get very enthusiastic, only to come back the next day and find it painted over. It would always sway back to a familiar trajectory ultimately. My conversations with Paul over the years, and my observations in his studio gave me a behind the scenes view of him testing, adding, subtracting, destroying – In my experience, artists often add ‘bells and whistles’ before discovering that they usually resonate a little too loud.

These activities for Paul, in recent times, seem to have found a comfortable resting point. The bells and whistles have been tossed and the fundamental qualities that provided weight to all of his painting have been reevaluated – colour, texture, shape, light, motif. Additional embellished thoughts around his paintings that once floated loudly, have slowly swung down to the canvas and flattened into still pools of silence. This defogging has resulted in a zoomed out holistic perspective – I feel like each painting has become a vast plain, and they all relate to each other in some fractured geographical way. —Mark O’Gorman