I paint from motifs that change over time—a lemon tree as it grows and its fruit matures, a cluttered living room, or the things on a kitchen countertop that shift about during the day. As compositional problems present themselves in the paintings, I’ve started using arbitrary planes of color to resolve them. This has freed me to make intuitive, spontaneous adjustments while I’m painting. As I make these changes to balance the composition, the surface of the painting becomes crusty with the layers of changes I’ve made over time, and the space of the painting becomes fragmented.

I’ve been working on a larger scale in my multi-figure compositions, filling the canvas with closely packed, life-sized figures that reference historical paintings. I’m interested in how the figures relate to one another—how one body presses up against the other, how the gesture of one figure might be repeated by the one behind. I think the play of abstraction and figuration in these paintings is particularly compelling.