Recent Paintings

My process often begins with a specific idea or challenge in mind which I use as an outset to make a painting. These ideas provide the paintings with a structure from which an image can be improvised, and I often deviate from this structure in favor of what I feel the paintings need. I think there’s a poetics that lies between setting out to accomplish something, and the negotiation of the process that often leads to something else entirely. If an idea can lead me somewhere unexpected or expand into more paintings, then I know I have something that works. On My Way Home began as a challenge to appropriate a charcoal fan art drawing of Vin Diesel into a painting. The original subject of the drawing became incidental to the work as my inability to accurately represent took over in the mediation of the image, and to embrace this kind of failing is integral to my practice. People often talk about the paralyzing feeling that comes from the confrontation of the blank canvas. Perhaps this comes from a fear of losing your way in the process, and then having to surrender to the painting. I think for me it’s important to live in that experience as I’m painting, because the more lost I get, the more I can really explore.