The Process

I was nineteen years old when I started painting. I was not in college for art, but my boredom and curiosity led me on journeys where I discovered how fascinatingly beautiful and mysterious the world is. I realized that my current studies would never satisfy my curiosity, so I choose painting as my avenue for exploring the mysteries of perception. 

 Ideally, I want to create paintings that resemble the process of seeing. Drawing everyday for the past twelve years has allowed me to realize I know less and less about how I perceive the visual world.  For me, drawing is not a means to record objects, but a process I can use to articulate an experience of a certain space and time. Drawing perceptually means recording with a lot of mental fluctuations, changing perspectives, and disproportionate understandings.  We may know what we are looking at, but broken down visually, in regards to shape, the structure of our visual world is in a constant state of flux. Move your head one inch and every shape you see changes its identity. So while I gather information from direct perceptual observation, I end up with paintings which look abstract.

Color is one of the most beautiful elements of the visual world. I am fascinated by the idea that through only three colors anything can be created. While colors cannot be mixed to match what we see directly, any proportion system can be made. This is a seductively complex concept. I work with twelve or so tube colors, I’m always mixing when I paint, I want the colors to go on clean so that uniqueness of individual shapes can be recognized. I start a painting by building colors in response to what I am seeing based on the idea of warm, cool, light, or dark.  At the end of each days studio work, I rebuild the colors on my palette, creating new systems for the next day’s work. Color keeps growing and slowly changing within a painting until a specific visual weight is achieved. When that happens the painting is finished, a little burden is released, and the process continues.