With my recent work I hope to shed light on my creative process, which starts with a few random marks and ends up as a finished piece. One question I ask myself often when I draw is “is it done yet?” There are so many possibilities that I think of when I’m working that the answer to this question is hardly ever clear. Or, at least, it’s not the same answer for each piece. In my version of the creative process, I’ve discovered that “done” is not an accurate description. “Resting point” is a better fit.
The time I end up spending on a new piece is mostly a matter of how much time I have. Sometimes a piece is finished in a day and sometimes I work away at it for weeks or months. But when I’m in the flow, time feels limitless. The process of creating, changing, adding colors and textures, playing is endlessly fascinating to me.
The content of the work is another question entirely. I want to develop the image — whether it’s a depiction of an empty room, a woman’s face, or a group deep in conversation — through trial and error. It’s super rare for me to start a painting and complete it in a straightforward fashion from start to finish. It’s extremely likely that any of my paintings or drawings are the end result of a long wrestling match with the canvas, during which I rework, erase, or turn it upside down and paint or draw on top of what came before. The layers hidden under the final image give it a history. If you look closely, you can often find where the nose on a face used to be before I moved it, or where the paint built up on a horizon line only to be covered up and moved an inch or two. That gives the piece a kind of resonance and depth that I hope comes across in the final version.
