I begin most paintings without a fixed plan. A few marks are enough to start the surface moving. From there I build layers of paint, collage, and texture, only to disrupt them again. I scrape, wash, repaint, and eventually cut back into the work with a scalpel, digging through the layers to expose what has been buried. Earlier decisions are never fully erased. They remain inside the painting, and the surface records those revisions.

I return to the human figure because it is immediate. A body is something we recognize before we understand it. When I cut into the surface, the marks stop feeling decorative and start reading as experience. Collage enters the work at certain points to interrupt the direction of the painting and force a shift that I couldn’t reach by painting alone.

Titles usually arrive late. They surface when the painting begins to reveal what it has been carrying all along. By the end, the work holds a record of what it went through. What survives is not the original intention but the evidence of searching. When someone recognizes a piece of their own life in it, the painting is finished