The painting series Any Bright Ideas began as a deliberate break from a fourteen-year project based on the production and exhibition of faux religious icons. A drunken, humorously objectifying proposition from a friend became the pretext to work against the anti-creative orthodoxies that I had recognised were infecting my practice. What emerged was a confrontation with the neurotic self-repetition that had always marked the Numinous paintings, set against the conviction that art should remain a space for exploring freedom rather than managing it. The paintings stage that demand in my own subjective reality, where the management of my freedom creates the tension that is visible in the work.

Artists are increasingly encouraged to treat neurotic patterns like repetition, obsession and personal trauma as inherently generative once channelled into self-expression. While this language serves a purpose in my work in community settings, I reject it in my own practice as a form of false reconciliation that redeems the symptom of unfreedom as wellbeing or resilience. The painting system I have developed in Any Bright Ideas is a direct challenge to that redemption. This is an acceptance of the unfinished task of Modernism; keeping the problem of form, freedom, and unfreedom open rather than resolving it into therapeutic or ethical positivity.