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I consider the paintings I make as structures—literal as well as philosophical—that are contained, as per necessity, by their physical precincts; intending their objecthood (the images within the picture-plane) to be metaphorical as well as pictorial. The paintings are meant to mimic and translate the notion of structures generally, the physical, experiential, psychic—what have you—structures that make up our daily lives, but that we usually cannot see in the aggregate; that we only see fragments of in the context of our daily experience and our changing frames of reference. Thus the paintings are in essence palimpsests, things written and over-written on themselves continually, until what is left are traces of a whole, liminal points on a map that cannot be fully seen; the uncharted aspects of what is considered fixed. As tracings the paintings meet their intention as meditative objects, left open to the viewer as to what is being mapped.
The approach to making the work is embedded in processes that are designed to limit my own facility in building them. Whatever my intention is at any one point in the painting process, that intention is by design somewhat mitigated, to the point where—if the painting is successful—it gains a certain autonomy that I either follow or try to contradict, push against. I think of this point of equilibrium between my own intention and the physical reality of the painting in progress as a kind of stillness, a state where erasing and adding amount to the same thing.
Making paintings is the nearest kind of activity I have found to the experience of simply being in the world and negotiating it. Painting is a practice not in the sense of a routine but in the way that meditation is a practice, one that by definition has no fixed resolution.
