Why I Only Make Originals.

People ask me sometimes whether I sell prints. The honest answer is no, and it is not a business decision. It is just how I think about making work.

Every painting I make starts with no plan. I work on the floor or against the wall, responding to what is already on the surface, letting one mark lead to the next. By the time a painting is finished it holds something, a specific combination of decisions, accidents, corrections and moments of clarity, that cannot be recreated. Not by me. Not by anyone. The painting exists once and then it is done.

That is not a selling point. It is just the truth of how painting works.

What a print cannot give you

A print is a photograph of a painting. A very good print, made carefully, can capture color and composition reasonably well. What it cannot capture is surface. The way oil sticks build up and drag across each other. The warmth of brown paper showing through in unexpected places. The gestural pencil lines that sit on top of everything else and catch the light differently depending on where you are standing.

I have seen prints of my work and they look like pictures of my work. The paintings themselves look like something else entirely. There is a depth to the surface of an original that you only understand when you are standing in front of it.

There is also scale. When you see Vertical Pulse reproduced on a screen it looks like a painting. When you are standing in front of the actual 60 by 72 inch canvas the experience is completely different. The marks are the size of your hand. The canvas fills your field of vision. You are not looking at it the way you look at a picture. You are in it.

What you are actually buying

When someone buys an original painting from me they are not buying a decoration for their wall. They are buying a specific object that I made on a specific day using specific materials that will never be recombined in exactly the same way again. That object will change slightly as the light in the room changes. It will look different on a grey morning than it does on a bright afternoon. It will reveal new things the longer you live with it.

A print is the same every time you look at it. It does not change. It does not surprise you.

I think the people who buy my work understand this without needing me to explain it. They are not buying a painting because it matches the sofa. They are buying it because something happened when they looked at it and they want that thing on their wall for the next thirty years.

That feeling is what originals are for.

The other thing you are buying

Every original painting comes with a signed certificate of authenticity and the story of how it was made. When you buy Confetti in a Windstorm you know it was built on brown paper, layer by layer, using oil sticks and markers, and that it took shape over weeks before it found its balance. When you buy Shoreline Stripes you know it comes from a specific memory of Cape Town beaches, surfboards lined up in every color against the light, carried for decades before it became marks on canvas.

A print does not come with a story. The original does. And the story becomes part of what you own.

If you are deciding between an original and a print and you have the means to buy the original, buy the original. You will not regret it. I have never heard from a collector who wished they had bought the reproduction instead.