I love to paint. I'm not saying I'm the next Van Gogh or anything, nor am I saying that my paintings are very good, but I just love painting.

I can almost hear you groaning 'Oh bother, not another crazy fan trying to emulate Viggo Mortensen!', but seriously, painting means alot to me.

It allows me to express my feelings in ways that sketching cannot. Sketching was my first love, until I discovered the joy of painting. So now, I find that sketching is too hard, and too concrete somehow. I mean, it's..perhaps it's the medium. Pencils have always been cold. Too hard, in a way, to absorb any feeling or emotion of any sort.

Painting is beautiful. I love painting abstract pictures. For one thing, it's far easier to do if one is trying to express one's emotions, because I find that if I were to paint an actual object, most people would not link the object with any emotion of any sort, just a place or memory. And for anoher (to me, anyway), it's far more pleasing and interesting to the eye.

Painting releases me. I vent everything I feel into a painting and into colours, although I must admit it's rather annoying when inspiration hits me at unholy hours; my last painting took some form at eleven at night, and kept me up until one in the morning.

However, it did manage to captivate me for two or three straight hours, as the soft night suffused my room and mingled with the paint and the air, making everything from the water to my paint-smeared fingers seem magical for that one instant, that one moment.

Painting transports me to another world, and in painting, there's a freedom that I can revel in, drink and savour that does not seem to exist in anything else.

And the beauty of art or any form of expression?

There are no rules.

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