When I was a kid, we lived in a sprawling apartment complex in Denver, CO. I must've been three or four at the time. On the way home from the tiny community pool, I realized I had left my favorite t-shirt behind. It was navy, short-sleeved and displayed a muscular cartoon football player with a thick neck that stopped at the collar where my head became the player's head. (It didn’t hurt that I had a helmet-shaped haircut.) I looked all over for it: around the pool deck, under the chairs, at the bottom of the pool, by the bushes, in the parking lot—several times. My brother finally shouted, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?! My shirt! I shot back, my eyes darting around in desperation, glaring at the pool-goers who obviously stole it. YOU'RE WEARING IT!! Whaaaaat...? Such a relief to look down and find my favorite shirt that had never been missing. That's a large part of what I think my abstract painting practice is, an opportunity to search for the things I thought I had lost only to find that I’d been looking for them in the wrong places.
In my work, I intentionally try to get lost which fills me with equal measures of frustration and aspiration. It’s not the kind of lost where time falls away, although that's important, but it’s being lost where the way forward is veiled in uncertainty. Searching for some sort of closure with the ambiguous mess in front of me, I work to coax something out of the canvas rather than imposing something onto it. I’m striving to short-circuit the connection to what is familiar and habitual in hopes to discover something new or to rediscover something forgotten. Not wanting to hide, the marks compete and clash, then as if by fate somehow find a coherent rhythm. And I suppose we are all like each of these marks, wavering between awkward and elegant, working hard to find our place in the melody.
