The work I create mirrors the way I try to live. I'm interested in approaching painting through a response to feeling as opposed to the intellect. I've been trying to connect to something intuitive. What is intuition? Is it truth? Is it my nature? Is it God? From what I understand, intuition is the ability to know something directly, from your gut, without the use of reason. It is a truth that does not require proof or justification, one's inner voice that often speaks in synchronicities. If the intellect cannot be transcended completely, then perhaps it is best used to hold one's inferior voices at bay so that the truth of the intuition can be heard.

I've dabbled in automatic writing and drawing. These exercises help to summon the intuition, but while they are both useful and fun, I continually return to representational painting.

Every so often, I'll come across an event, person, place or object that speaks to me in metaphor, tells a story, opens up a mythological doorway that expands me in some way, either by providing an answer or a more compelling perspective than the one I had.

These are the narratives that I use in my work. Often, I combine the subjects with text that is written in color as well as collage. The text may be in languages other than English in order to evoke another culture or a foreign atmosphere. The viewer is not necessarily guided towards a literal understanding, but rather, is allowed to experience their own intuitive/feeling response, similar to the process I used in creating the work.

Sometimes I'll alter the text over time, building up layers until the words are illegible. I treat the letters and words as though they are pure form with positive and negative shapes and let the overall composition be dictated by the automatic placement and alterations of these shapes as well as my representational subject matter.

Cyrille Conan