Color is one of the few things contemporary painting can still claim as its own, and I treat it as both the material and the subject of my works. So much has already been painted that the question of why to paint at all is unavoidable, and my answer runs through color: what it can do directly, when it isn't being asked to depict or illustrate something else. Color reaches the senses before the mind has named anything, and that immediate effect is what I work to amplify.
Most of what I value in painting comes down to what an instant, machine-made image cannot do. An image can be made in a second now. A painting takes the opposite route: built slowly, by hand, and opens just as slowly for anyone willing to stand with it. The hand leaves irregularities, and I let them remain, so the making stays present in the finished surface – the trace of a body, in a field of images that no one touched.
I work without expecting how a painting will resolve, responding to what the color does and letting chance carry part of the outcome, because painting is one of the few practices where the unplanned can outperform the designed. Some works begin with printed material I collect from the street, which I treat less as an image than as a starting point to paint against, chosen as much by accident as by intent. That material carries the marks of where it came from, anchoring the finished work to a particular time and place.
My paintings stop just before an image would form, so the eye begins to read them and finds itself filling the gap. That opening is where the viewer enters – meaning forms from their own experience more than from mine. What the work asks for is increasingly rare, and worth protecting: the slowness in which a person can notice their own mind, and meet themselves in what they see.