There’s an unnameable kind of excitement you feel when you recognize the thing you’ve been looking for - especially if you didn’t even know you were seeking it. It’s a big part of why artists create, and why audiences look: we want to experience wonder.
The world can reveal itself in surprising ways: when shadows distort perspective, for example, or when positive and negative space change places. These moments are thrilling, and even scary; to me, they’re intimations, little signs and wonders, that the world we think we see is not the only one that exists.
When I paint, I try to create conditions for those signs and wonders to appear. I move material around, apply some, erase some, get frustrated, wipe it all out - until something surprising appears and somehow I know it IS the thing I want to see, and I recognize it and stop.
Sometimes this process is very fast, and sometimes it’s slow and involves a lot of revisiting and recreating conditions; and sometimes it goes too far and things are too obscured and I need a fresh start. To say it involves more feeling than conscious thought risks a familiar kind of ridicule, but to me the point of painting - and looking - is to connect with things we don’t have words for.
When you look at my work, I hope you have the same experience of discovery that I have in the studio. I hope you can tell that my paintings and prints are often roughly and cheaply made because they’re signposts on a journey rather than monuments erected at a destination. They’re me sharing something I saw with you: drying puddles that look like two people kissing; a tortured surface whose scars read as stars; the hole in the leaf a child laughingly peeps through - haha! The world is full of magic.