I start with a mark and build the painting forward until it begins to resist me. Layers accumulate, get painted over, scraped back, and built again. I don’t try to protect the first image. I test it. What remains is whatever survives that process.

Collage, paint, erasure, and revision stay visible on the surface. I want the work to carry evidence of its own making. The painting becomes a record of decisions, doubts, and corrections rather than a polished illusion.

My subjects shift. Sometimes a figure appears, sometimes a flower, sometimes something absurd or bizarre. They are not meant to resolve into a clear narrative. They are entry points into the same investigation of memory, instability, and emotional weight. I’m interested in the tension between building something up and cutting back into it, the way experience accumulates and then gets reinterpreted over time.

Because of that, I don’t aim for a fixed style. Each painting finds the form it needs. Humor, distortion, awkwardness, or severity are all tools if they push the image closer to something honest.

In the end the work has to stand without me. I place it in front of the viewer and see if it holds. If someone slows down and begins to notice the layers, the revisions, the scars left in the surface, the painting starts to do what I hoped it might. It becomes less about my explanation and more about the moment between the work and the person looking at.

©EricRottcher2026