My project
Painting for me is an immediate process, even though it can take months and years before a painting is finished. This because the actual technique entails such unequivocal contact between painter and product. There is nothing in between, except perhaps a brush, a spatula, a roller. Since the painting is so direct, it will always mirror time. Time and space. The medium is timeless and has changed little. The techniques have been pulled in all directions. All conceivable ways to paint have already been tried. But each painter is new, and represents a time, a life, a story.
In this way, the process of painting is meditation, in which constant presence is demanded of the painter. These layers upon layers of attention, hours and hours of closeness, weeks of ubiquity, always here, always now, combine to create the unique intensity and energy that characterizes a good painting. The accumulated attention is integrated into the painting and creates a story. Not a story placed in time, but rather a story of “now” after “now” after “now”. An infinite number of “nows”.
My paintings are abstract and emotional, and vary from the poetic to the more expressive, color and composition the preeminent expression in them all.
I paint directly on the canvas without a preconceived idea or notion, and vary through the process between intuitive feelings, or spontaneity, and more conscious decisions. As a participating observer, in the one moment I live inside the painting, playfully, intuitively, in the next I observe it from the outside, with more a cynical focus on composition, light, entirety. This is how my paintings come to be, between the lived and the observed.
My main purpose is to explore how colors, surfaces, brush strokes and abstract forms combine to communicate feelings or atmospheres. I am fascinated by the process, like a journey. To exist within the complexity and chaos of every unfinished canvas. And then, with time and with many layers of paint, shapes, and non-shapes, to explore and discover the beauty, the order or the composition of each particular painting.
My finished paintings will always contain many contrasts. They will embody something tame and something wild. Encompass something beautiful, a harmony, and at the same time contain elements that provoke and agitate. It excites me to work within these intersections. To get a painting to balance on the tension between contrasts. The way we do in life.