The Empress, Regina Caelorum Painting

I believe that painting, especially now, demands bravery. If I didn't have skin in the game, I wouldn't need to make the work. For me, painting is the most honest form of thinking. Even as I reach the end of a painting, it remains an open form. The work only seems to belong to me, when it actually always already belonged to the world. My consciousness is a composite of memory, a collage of outside influences, and as I put that in the work, I find that the world emerges again, slightly reconfigured, through my hands. When I paint, I gain radical access to my own physical, emotional, and intellectual permeability. I embrace with exuberance the impossibility of doing anything untouched by history, as that creates the freedom to explore the multiplicity of meaning within painterly gesture itself. Mark-making is a code of signs, complete with its own idioms.The permeability of human consciousness is essential to the work because it creates a space for the historically distinct models of image-making and narrative I use to echo off one another. In the space of the painting, I aim to create a resonance within the consciousness of the viewer that breaks the boundaries of the object itself.