The paintings begin in attention. Before subject, before image, there is a state of looking and listening — to color, to weight, to the pull between what wants to emerge and what wants to remain submerged. I work in acrylic on canvas, occasionally on unstretched canvas and paper, building each painting through accumulation and removal in roughly equal measure.

What interests me is the threshold where perception becomes feeling. Not the depiction of an emotion, but the conditions under which one arrives. A passage of dense pigment meets a stretch of nearly bare ground; a saturated mark gets answered by a quieter neutral; a drip is left intact because it tells the truth about gravity and time. These are not stylistic choices so much as the structure of the work itself — a record of decisions made, reconsidered, and sometimes overridden by the painting's own insistence.

I am drawn to the moment when a surface begins to hold its own weather. Color behaves atmospherically, gathering and dispersing, and the canvas becomes less a window than a field of pressure. Some paintings resolve into something nearly architectural — clear weight above, suspended space below. Others stay closer to flux, with marks layered into something between palimpsest and weathered wall. In both cases I am after a kind of charged stillness: the painting active enough to hold attention, settled enough to be lived with.

The relationship between gesture and restraint matters more than either alone. A bold mark loses its force without a counterweight of quiet; a neutral passage becomes inert without something to push against. I think of this as a kind of conversation the painting carries on with itself, and my role is to listen carefully enough to know when it has finished speaking.

I am not interested in resolution that arrives too easily. The paintings that hold up over time, for me, are the ones that retain some unresolvedness — a tension that doesn't release, an ambiguity that keeps the work in motion. This is what I am after: surfaces that continue to move even when nothing on them is changing.

Working at a larger scale and with a more restrained palette has clarified the stakes. With less, each decision carries more weight, and the paintings have to earn their presence rather than perform it. That economy, paradoxically, is what allows the strongest emotional charge to come through.