Every painting starts the same way. Off-white ground, one color, laid down before I've decided anything else — the first mark is a decision I react to, not one I execute. From there I build heavy acrylic in blocks until a form starts to emerge, cover it in modeling paste or whitewash when it says more than I want, scrape back through wet paint like an excavation when it says too little. Pastel sometimes marks an edge the paint won't resolve. Most paintings finish in one or two sessions; the pace keeps a painting tied to that particular sitting, though what ends up on the wall gets tested again and again afterward, through sequencing, comparison, and crit.

What comes out is rarely settled. A half-figure reads as a body, then a landscape, then neither. A block of color sits as atmosphere in one passage and as a solid form pressing against the edge of the canvas in the next. A whitewashed patch stays visible as a decision, not a correction. You can tell something used to be there. The paintings hold two moves at once, concealment and excavation, and that visible back-and-forth is the point. Nothing here is simulated. Every mark records something I actually decided, in real time, on that canvas.

I care less about what a viewer decides the work is about than about watching them decide it. Look at a half-figure turning into a landscape long enough and you can feel the moment someone reaches for a frame: a narrative, a symbol, an identity to pin it to. Why do we do that? Why sort an unfamiliar thing into a category fast enough that we can stop actually looking at it? I don't resolve that ambiguity. Resolving it would hand the viewer exactly the certainty I'm trying to withhold.

Some of this comes from a life spent moving between contexts — art history before I made anything myself, a stretch of painting in Mexico City, now working out of the Pacific Northwest — each one asking me to read differently, and be read differently, depending on whatever frame was on hand. I think of Clyfford Still and Etel Adnan less as models than as a shared instinct: let the material carry real weight, and let one mark set the terms for the next. Adnan put it exactly right. A mark creates a situation, and the situation calls for the next gesture.