The world can reveal itself in surprising ways: when shadows distort perspective, for example, or when positive and negative space change places. These moments offer thrilling - even scary - intimations that the world is not always what it seems. Such signs and wonders seem full of possibility.
I try to create conditions that invite those signs and wonders to appear. I move material around, apply some, erase some, get frustrated, wipe it all out - until something startling emerges, and I recognize it, or I want to look more at it, and I 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 thought risks a 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, catching something at the side of your gaze: a fast-stroke frog-fish; a tortured surface whose scars are stars; the hole in a leaf a child peeps through, laughing - haha! Magic.