I’m working with a variety of media here, including oil, acrylic, airbrush, pencil, and oil pastel. The painting is 60” x 120”, composed of three 60” x 40” canvases.

For this painting, I wanted to play with a few different kinds of visual languages. There’s the flat, descriptive language of illustration, and the saturated richness of landscape painting, cut into the painting’s surface in geometric windows. Stamps and sigils, scribbles and crests populate the surface. I wanted to evoke a workmanlike quality, to capture some of the accidental beauty of stamps and maker’s marks. I’m trying to walk the razor’s edge between intentional and accidental marks, so that it still reads as a composition, but has the life and beauty of something unplanned.

I’ve always found it a challenge to try to (constructively) not care about an end result. When generations of new marks overwrite or erase previous ones, sometimes you’re left with a beauty that you couldn’t have predicted. But just as often, the results are bad. The trick is continuing through the whole process toward something meaningful.