What’s the transformation you’re looking for?

I’m looking for physical response.

When I make art, usually, there’s an anxiety that I’m feeling – that need to create almost feels just a little bit anxious. Like, there’s a knot in my stomach. So mixing color, laying down paint, listening to music, dancing while I’m painting, they helped me push through it.

I often have an idea about what I’m going to paint, but in the process, my body informs the final outcome, I never really know what the finished piece is going to look like. That anxiety that I feel it moves to excitement. It’s exciting, and then it kind of peaks and comes to a calm. So it’s like the work itself is a meditation on agitation.

So for the viewer, I’m looking for a physical response as well, something that transforms the way they’re feeling enough to feel a physical shift. If someone has a physical shift when they’re looking at my work, then I feel like the work is successful. I’d like the viewer to respond to the image in a way that brings their their own inner nature to the surface.

My experience of nature is that it’s it’s not all neat and tidy. You know? There’s a danger to it. I want the viewer to be a little uncomfortable but drawn in as well. I work with scratches and quivering edges. It’s more than just a pleasant image. But what is it?

I want the viewer to fill in the blank.

What is it that’s emerging? I want them to look. It’s not all pleasant. There’s something underlying it all. There’s something stirring underneath at all. I want to communicate to the viewer that there’s something underlying, something underneath, the surface. It peeks through here and there.

It’s the layers in the scratches in the places where the underlying layers are exposed.

What happens for you when you create, or make art, or view art?

November 22, 2021
New York City