It is symptomatic of our politically debased and game/tv reality show culture that formal and spatial values in figurative art have become dirty words - art, like society, has no depth and surface is all.

Contemporary use of bright cheerful colour by collapsing the tonal range as if only playing two octaves on an eight-octave keyboard is also part of this trivialisation.

I was fortunate in the Sixties to be taught by some of the last of the old guard R.A and R.P members for whom form and structure were the probity of art.

This has enabled me to make the serious articulation of form in space the main motivation of my paintings and Artificial Intelligence has made this mixture of formal discipline and human error/intuition completely relevant as it is further from Artificial Intelligence than all other art forms.

Furthermore, for there to be human error there has to be formal discipline and these were dirty words from the later 20th Cent onwards thus invalidating much of their “avantgard” with this new criterion.