The themes in my work are as varied and colourful as my South African background and the multi-cultures I've been exposed to. As such I wish to refer to landscape, urban as well as pastoral, and states of mind.

With the wide eyes of a child I'm moved to wonder at everything there is to see. Art, I believe has the function to save us from disaster by creating alongside the everyday world another realm, fashioned to the requirements of the human spirit and in keeping with an inner order which is in sharp contrast to the chaos around us. It provides a kind of anchorage. I wish to make my own personal statement – tenuous, though in a truly human voice.

What I wish to offer in my paintings are depictions of a reality to which the viewer can relate, through the medium of the senses, through the use of the technical resources of painting, colour, collage, and text, etc. In other words I wish to use the canvas as a theatre of operations for the assertion of realities. Most of my images are frontal, which give them an immediacy – thus not only having an immediate and sudden effect but also a challenge to the viewer who finds himself unceremoniously faced on a par with myself as the artist, already deeply implicated.

The space which I create is here and now, the expression of something immediate- there is no spatial or temporal distancing to create the feeling on the part of the viewer as if though he were there, or is actually there (inside the picture ), not simply in front of it, this results in a form ofdirect participation.

I demand in everything that there be life - the possibility of existence, and then all is well: we are then not called upon to ask if the work is beautiful or ugly. The feeling that what has been created comes before either consideration and is the only criterion in matters of art.

Ivor Sias