The world, in its original state, is formless—like vapor, without shape.
Even as I am unsettled by how elusive it is, I want to preserve that presence in my paintings as fully as possible.
Emotion merges self and other. Language, like a boundary, separates self from world. Painting, too, is a boundary.
I borrow motifs, landscapes, images of people, digitally generated forms—using them to capture fragments of the chaotic world before me as temporary records.
Yet the world as it is already holds richness. The moment I draw a boundary, that richness may collapse into something dull or become an entirely different story. Doubt arises in this gap.
To surrender to the spread of water is an attempt to hold, within the painting, the shimmer between the unnamed world and the boundaries we draw.
Beyond layers of images and records, or in the space between one painting and another, the "world before naming" resurfaces.
For me, to paint is both to draw a boundary and to erase it.