Learning To See Painting

Throughout my work, I investigate coffee as a medium through various ways such as brewing methods, experimenting with drying times, and exposing it to the elements. Coffee as a medium affords me a multitude of technical variables and a set of connotative variables. I mix these variables with the social connotations coffee holds in our modern day society, to explore the parallels of human fragility and emotions to the evolution of current times and the passing of time. The way coffee moves on canvas holds an air of randomness, I have no definitive control on what the final outcome will be but I am able to add variables along the way to influence where I want it to go. Like human behavior, my work is largely based in the abstract but I am able to guide the canvas by adding different variables in the making. Each painting takes anywhere between a month to 2 years to complete, and 10 to 120 layers of coffee. It’s a drink that changes through different cultures, a drink that’s come to represent so much more than itself; & it’s only fitting that coffee is used here in my study of human behavior. Its chaos but it’s also structure, this juxtaposition mirroring the contradiction of trying to map out something so undeniably organic like human behavior through a scientific lens can only be defined as Quantified Chaos.