I paint narrative. It's true. I can't help it, it's what I love to do. And if you paint people in a scene, then it possesses narrative. You can't escape it. I don't think this is a bad thing. Narrative is fundamental to our experiences. We see things as having beginnings, middles and ends - even our own lives. It's intrinsic to us.

But I don't often set out to paint any specific narrative, I paint scenes that have stuck in my head; things I have seen, and found beautiful and memorable.

Yet memory tends to generalise and stereotype the things outside our direct importance, so that instead of my remembering a scene with this person and that building, I remember something more like ‘this type of person and that type of building'. I enjoy the way that this can result in images at once individual and universal.

ERIC

July, 2007