I have been engaged in abstract painting and poetry most of my adult life. Whilst I don’t have any formal qualification in these fields, I have studied them deeply. In my early 20s I enrolled in a foundational art course at The Learning Connexion in Wellington, NZ. There I was lucky to find a tutor who was also a prominent abstract painter. A group of us entered into a dialogue about “what abstract painting is”. During this period I quickly moved away from my realist roots and started developing my own abstractions. When liberated from the constraints of naturalistic forms, the formal relationships operating in a work come to the fore. Nature is beautiful, I would never deny that, but so is pure expressive colour, so are perceptual ambiguity, the play of symmetry and asymmetry, transparency, and the other devices painters employ. The move towards abstraction has been creatively liberating for me.