I work at the intersection between the emotional and the rational, the subconscious and the intentional, the provisional and the systemic. I begin with random, expressive gestures; in my larger paintings there is underpainting in acrylic and ink. I begin to work out color and other compositional ideas bit by bit, transitioning to oil and pigment stick when the surface has been covered and a plan has begun to emerge. Order gradually is imposed on chaos. I follow the painting’s lead. I struggle to listen to what is being offered. I throw in my thoughts from time to time, about particle physics and the weather, human history, current events, like some metaphysical stream of consciousness. I attempt to see how the various elements react with one another... a meandering line may somehow capture a previously unseen connection... some ethereal essence ... so another layer becomes here concise, there a shadow, an echo.

Both adding and scraping away, using pouring and tilting the paper, rubbing and layering the color with brush, pen and fingers to form a kind of scaffolding or grid that is then complicated and made unlikely or even impossible in places, pushed out as far as possible before being rescued to some sort of momentary clarity, the process left traceable, the past visible. In the larger pieces, oil pigment stick is burnished into the surface to create areas of translucence and opaqueness, where areas mutate and shift. Solid mass becomes fluid, edges hazy, while something else, swirling, becomes dense. Time runs through the picture plane like a river, shifting the perspective the way the eye makes a saccade through a room, picking up details to memorialize, even as they vanish or pivot away. Mass appears as if abstracted thought has become crystalized, a figure back-lit in a doorway, an object illuminated by passing headlights from the road, leaving after- images burned on the retina. So the painting is asking “Did I see that? What was that?