The following quotations have been pulled from an hour-long studio visit with the artist, with minor edits made for brevity.
ON THE CREATIVE PROCCESS:
My process is very meandering. In the process of painting there is a lot of doubt, and that’s good. I think doubt is important in a work.
A good painting should be a test, or a playground, for you to question what you are doing. Because otherwise, why are you doing it? I am doing it because I don't have the questions answered.
I usually work on a painting a month, and I am sort of getting studio visits along the way, and trying to ask questions. There are a lot of questions that I'm perpetually repeating.
I try to spend the first two hours in the studio just working in silence before turning on a phone or anything like that. But after that, I give myself the opportunity to listen to music and jam out. But when that happens, my focus drops a little bit.
ON PAINTING:
I am using the canvas as a frame, and thinking about the history of painting, and the idea that originally, paintings were done on skin that was stretched. So I am thinking about how a surface can be a type of skin or a type of body.
I am really flattening everything in my paintings, and trying to bring the painting into our space vs. this pictorial space that you usually enter when you look at a painting.
I feel like painting is just dealing with cliches – that's all it is. Its being able to make a cliche your own, and take it past the point of cliche.
I want my thumbnail drawings to look really rough. I feel like when you make a really refined drawing, sometimes it can do the thing that you wanted to do with the painting. But it’s really important to me to make mistakes on the canvas and then respond to those mistakes: cover them up, and figure it out on the canvas.
ON A SIDE SCULPTURE PROJECT IN THE STUDIO:
I have been working on this for years now, and I am trying to exercise faith with it in terms of not really having much but just slowly continuing to work on it. Even if it is a failure, I am trying to see where it goes and what it makes me think along the way.
Last week I was like, should I chuck this? Then I was like no, and I glued up some more styrofoam onto it. And it's just part of the process: thinking in another way, thinking with more dimensionality, and then going back and painting.
Maybe I'll throw it out. I mean, maybe I will. I feel like I throw a lot of stuff out.