Given the artist’s emphasis on the spiritual  aspect of these paintings – largely inspired by the artist’s experiences of „awakening“ during regular visits to India, in which he spends time in both Hindu and Jain temples – he is paradoxically within and outside the act of painting simultaneously. This offers a certain clarity. As the British mystic Colin Wilson once explained at a lecture in New York in the early nineties, the way toward enlightenment cannot be achieved by trying too hard or by relaxing to the point of not trying at all. Rather it is most likely to occur when one is hovering these extremes. In Groom’s case, the experience obatined trough these painting – as referenced by the sacred Sanskrit of the Om and Hrim – occurs in suspension between a clear awareness of the physical act of painting and a relaxed observation of the evolving surface. In either case, it isa a matter of a tenacious, though subtle movement between levels of consciousness without necessarily being in opposition. 

– Robert C. Morgan