The surface is never where I begin, but it is always where I end up — a record of decisions and their reversals.
Every painting begins as potential — a stretched linen, a prepared ground, an invitation. But somewhere in the process, the surface becomes the work itself. Not as image, not as representation, but as a physical record of accumulated attention.
I think about this often: the way a painting holds time. Each layer carries the evidence of the one before it — ghost marks, scraped passages, the shadow of an abandoned composition bleeding through. The surface is not where meaning resides; it is where meaning is negotiated.
The Ground as Subject
There is a long tradition of painters attending to the ground. Ryman made it explicit. Richter made it ambiguous. For me, the ground is neither purely formal nor purely conceptual — it is the site where material and intention meet, where the hand and the eye disagree and eventually find some provisional agreement.
Against Transparency
We are taught to look through paintings — to see the landscape, the figure, the narrative. But what happens when the painting insists on its own opacity? When the surface refuses to be a window and instead presents itself as a wall, a skin, a membrane?
"The painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience." — Mark Rothko
This is what I return to, session after session. Not the image, but the encounter. The surface as the site of that encounter.