ENA SWANSEA: During the time you have been a painter, there have been seismic movements in the means of transmission, in all areas perhaps, but, clearly, with image transmission, money, market transmissions, and critical discourse-we have popped out of the membrane that held us in, and into the immaterial ozone of the digital world. Our experience of space changes as we spend more time in this immaterial environment, checking our email, and whatnot; and so shifting back and forth between the

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... tual and the material world is fluid and reflexive. It is as if our hidden inner life has not changed; only the gadgets, which have moved part of that life out of tangible things, have changed. Painting is transmitted in an intimate, optical way, unlike what is received from a glowing screen. With the resonance of 8 "20 YEARS, PARKETT 72, 2004 It's kind of complicated how you receive it, because you receive a lot of it from just thinking about it, and other things pop into it. So, I would say, how you arrive at a conceptual basis is as intuitive as anything else, and how you direct that conception to a material object is complicated, because you try, and it fails, and you try, and it's off, and you try this, and you try that, and it works, finally, something works, and you've just stumbled your way into it. A lot of the process of painting is going from one part of your brain-the conceptual part, which is intuitive, but a different type-to the part that's almost unconscious, and it has to do with taste-what you like and what you don't like. ES: And that's built in to the back of your head. AK: It's built in. We carry that from birth, When you're born there are some things you like, and some things you don't like; some things stay with you and others are acquired. It's quite a complicated system of building, but you should always pay attention to your taste. ES: Taste, in a way, has its origins in the subconscious, where paintings come from, and there seems to be some passageway that you travel through, leading what is not known out onto the canvas. For instance, you have faith in the existence of irregular features in a portrait of someone who, in the flesh, seems quite symmetrical, at least to those who are not you. And yet, your image asserts itself as real, as if you found the flash point where the image arrives, not just in the eye, but in the nervous system of the viewer-which is not reassuring. AK: When you're dealing with the external world, it's far too much to comprehend intellectually, so you just try to make an equivalent for its appearance. Making it literal doesn't make it better; a lot of times it makes it worse. So if it gives you a feeling of what you want, that's good enough, because literal representation is usually quite boring. ES: In your work, the descriptive function always seems to have something off about it. It is as if your eyes never grew accustomed to the look of this world, of manufactured objects, the social practices of people, of nature itself. 10 20 YEARS, PARKETT 72, 2004