Currently painting in India

I’ve been painting in India lately.

It wasn’t exactly part of some grand, well-laid plan. Circumstances shifted—no studio in New Zealand for now, thanks to an ongoing legal battle—so I chose not to sit still and wait. Instead, I leaned into movement. Into change. Into uncertainty.

India, with its warmth (in every sense), has given me space to work again. It’s affordable, yes—but more than that, it’s alive. There’s an openness here. People are curious, generous, and—beautifully—quite willing to sit and be seen. To be painted.

That matters.

For the first time in a while, I’ve returned to portraiture. It feels like revisiting an old language I once spoke fluently, but now with a slightly different accent. Over the past twenty years, my style has become… reliable. Safe. Efficient. It worked. Maybe too well.

And that’s the problem.

There’s a quiet danger in knowing exactly what you’re doing all the time. You stop risking anything. You stop failing. And without failure, there’s no real growth—just repetition with better branding.

So I’ve made a decision: disrupt it.

Push against my own habits. Undo the muscle memory. Let things go wrong again. Let paintings collapse halfway through. Let faces distort, colors clash, compositions fall apart before they come back together—if they come back at all.

Because comfort is a slow kind of stagnation.

As David Bowie once said:

“Go a little bit out of your depth… When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

That’s where I want to be.

Not in control—but in discovery.

Not repeating—but searching.

I haven’t been destroyed, to someones annoyance. Not by circumstance, not by distance, not by disruption. If anything, I feel like I’ve been nudged—into a more honest place. One where the work can change again.

Everything backfires if intention is evil. 

And maybe that’s the point of all this.

To start over, without actually starting from zero.