If I could, I would detach my head and paint with my body. A good mark is more about the body than the mind—it’s the embodiment of everything I have to say in painting.

A mark needs to be right. It has to be meaningful.

The urgency that a gestural mark communicates when I eschew premeditation or a conscious methodology is significant.

My abstract paintings are informed by the scale of my body and centered around a carefully designed visual grid. The grid forms a hard and soft boundary for the work that creates a mutable tension between geometry and gestural marks. It’s a similar structure to that of a rib cage, where the organs are contained, protected, and integrated within the body. There is a tension and release; the grid consolidates the whole, snaps it together as a means of organization and rest, allowing my gestural mark to act as spontaneous response and movement. The duality is this tension between the two; one beseeches the other. A way to organize and comprehend the chaos. A way for chaos to come together, yet propel itself in a forward movement.

I’m not interested in the serene or sedate. This tension with myself and the work is a positive energy that clarifies the process of finding resolutions. It’s my fight to get as much as I can out of a painting.

The energy in my paintings is almost always in a state of conflict. That process of convergence is the closest to what it feels like to be alive.