Painting of overlapping figures and fish-like shapes, with bent limbs and outstretched hands crossed by looping outlines on a peach-coloured ground.Painting of two upright forms linked by a long horizontal shape, crossed by looping outlines and small hand-like marks.Painting of a solid red figure in profile, one knee raised and arms reaching outward, threaded with loose lines and overlapping outlines.Painting of a long red goat with tall horns and four round eyes, carrying a row of small black birds and a larger overlapping bird on its back.Painting of overlapping ducks with open beaks and lifted feet, repeated at different scales across a layered, looping ground.Painting showing the canvas 'Side Vision' on a wooden easel in the studio, against a large teal and green painted backdrop crossed by looping outlines.Painting of a large blue fish wrapped in pale figures and red looping lines, below a red band with the painted letters 'LMSTREALTTU.' and a row of black crows, a small boat at the left.Painting of several overlapping dark fish-like forms against a turquoise field, threaded onto taut horizontal cords through round green eyelets, with bright red fin-like marks and looping green lines.

Here the colour sits flat, there an odd layer shows through. Dust is dancing along an edge. The circumstances are not reproducible, just like the second impression bears only a family resemblance to the first.

The stencil saves a shape, it doesn't save the moment. The hand that cuts the stencil has itself been shaped by circumstances, even the impulse to create became a history. An old decision, stored in cardboard, keeps working for the person who has since changed.

The common form, examined in the stencil, consists of a hole. Put a finger through it. There is no figure to touch. An opening, an absence that permits the appearances. Perhaps that's what we all are - the openings through which consciousness encounters a particular landscape. The landscape acquires a name and answers to it, becoming as real as any other fantasy accepted by the most.

That's the substance you face in your struggle to satisfy the wish to make an impersonal painting. Choosing a stencil does not remove the person who chooses, it only gives that person a way to observe the consequences of a choice without having to make it again at each stroke. There is relief in letting the earlier decision continue a little further. There is also curiosity - once the shape no longer requires invention, the brush can attend to its pressure, the ground to its resistance. Authoring becomes contemplating and wondering.

Stencilling might be an attempt to see the real through the unreal, it might mean allowing an image to loosen the habit of presenting separate beings everywhere. On the canvas, many appearances share one opening. The eye recognises individuals and begins to count, but beneath them, there is one continuous surface. Even the cleanest outline cannot make what is inside independent. The temptation is to search for a pure impression, free of circumstances. Could it even exist?

Hold the stencil up before putting it away. Through the same opening, part of the room appears: a corner of the table, then the window. Move it a little. The opening remains available for whatever comes into view.

If consciousness animates every opening, even the wish to step outside the shape and understand it would occur within the shape. And the observer could be just yet another shape. Luckily, the painting could proceed without seeking a privileged position from which everything becomes clear. That is enough to begin.

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