My paintings are about the things I can’t stop thinking about, such as what’s happening in our heads and our bodies. I’m looking for a hypnotic quality that is achieved by concentrating on a particular vision—both visually and emotionally. Figurative elements persist, but they are phenomenological, like their environment, revealing their nature through their weight, scale, luminosity, and materiality. When I use a more literal approach to image-making, the content emerges through what becomes symbols for head space and agency. At other times, I subdue the literary and symbolic dominance of these images by submitting to the rigorous romance, also referred to as “responding to the process.” The psychological implications and emotional potency of this visual information is the work’s core. Since this approach is partially subjective, it helps me to distinguish the paintings’ general relationship to the outside world. In that effort, the question these paintings ask is not as much “Do you understand what I’m feeling?” as “How do I make you feel?”