Painting for me is largely an aspiration to stand aside and let the painting make itself. As every pearl needs its grain of sand, I start with a basic structure or diagram. In recent work, this diagram is made by tracing objects collected around the studio, creating a footprint of their presence, as in a rayograph. I’ve been focused on circular things—cans, cups, roles of tape—though for me the identity of these objects is mostly insignificant. I place more import on the intuitive moment of choosing (this object, not that one) and in the relations that form among objects. I like how this process of gathering grounds the painting in a specific place (when the weather warms, I would like to carry a canvas to the park and trace sticks, rocks and blades of grass). As the same shapes re-appear across works, they become constants or units of measure, forming a kind of alphabet. I see each diagrammatic arrangement as a figure—a figurative “subject,” which becomes the point of departure.  For a painting to discover itself, to paraphrase Howard Hodgkin, this subject must depart and return as an object, consummating the transition from the figurative to the figural.

The traced objects, the canvas, and my body all relate to each other at a 1:1 scale; in the field of physics this human scale is understood to sit about halfway between the smallest particle and the entire universe. I am interested in the potential for a painting to expand or contract beyond its physical boundaries.