Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I don’t want people to consider the space inside me that led to the creation of the painting. I am more interested in what emerges in them as they penetrate into the work. I want people to experience my paintings without words, names or titles, or art historical references. This can be dislocating, like moving through the world with one less sense or without a familiar category with which to organize experience. It seems to me that the magic (and risk) in art, whether making it or appreciating it, is precisely this experience of moving past the limits of what one knows and where one feels safe - to find oneself at the threshold of the unknowable. When patterns are broken, when consensus can’t be reached and when disruption or interruption occurs one is given an opportunity to awaken. For me, making (and viewing) paintings lives on this knife-edge, surgically opening up the possibility of relinquishing existing “truths” and entering a landscape where one has the opportunity to glimpse the limits of one’s understanding. It is the search for some record of the shape of our experience. In this small but important way, art offers the chance to live life more intensely.