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I want my paintings to be about colour, form, rhythm, structure, tension and balance - and that this combination should capture and hold the attention of the viewer. 

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Art historians usually categorise abstract paintings as painterly/expressionist, geometric or biomorphic. I am not so keen on the biomorphic style, as in Miro or late Kandinsky, with their curvy blobs and organisms floating around . I much prefer geometric abstraction - but the looser, more painterly style of Klee, Poliakoff or Adrian Heath rather than the rigid, purist form of Mondrian.

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I also very much like painterly/expressionist abstraction: the St Ives painters and the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 50s. For me the finest works of Lanyon, Heron and Wynter or Hoffman, Pollock, Still, Kline - or early Soulages - all have the same aesthetic impact and value as great figurative paintings through the ages. 

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When I started making abstract paintings I soon realised that complete abstraction still needs a well-thought out structure. In fact just as good a structure and finely-tuned composition as figurative works, perhaps even more so as figurative works have a story to fall back on. The best abstract paintings hold their form, colour, materiality, rhythm and expression in an all-over harmonious structure without one cancelling out the other. There also need to be both space and depth – optical depth, without perspective – but not too much of either of these or else the balance of the whole is disturbed.

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Then when everything comes together just so, you have the special magic of a great abstract painting. I would even go so far as to say that abstract painting at this level evokes some sort of metaphysical sensation in the viewer.  

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This is the kind of painting I would like to do.