Once Painting

I never truly begin with a blank surface. Even empty paper carries something: old marks, raw fibers, the memory of a gesture I haven’t made yet. I let these remnants stay. They are part of the conversation. My process moves in many states at once— searching and listening, planning and drifting, certainty crossing paths with hesitation. I follow color into color, line into form, not because I know where it leads, but because the next step only appears in the moment I take it. I work with what remains and what arrives, with traces that feel honest, with accidents that feel more truthful than anything I could decide beforehand. Sometimes I cover everything; sometimes I leave the beginning exposed so the past can breathe inside the present. I don’t paint to resolve things. I paint to stay inside the shifting— where intuition forms before language, where thought hasn’t yet become a sentence, where the unfinished is allowed to remain unfinished. Each piece is a layering of moments: a record of attention changing shape, a meeting between what I carried in and what the work asked from me. The result is not a final answer, but the trace of having been here, moving, feeling, questioning, becoming.