Painting for me is as much about technique and process as it is about the final artwork. To illustrate: Each painting embodies an element of chance and less regard to a premeditated outcome. My goal is not solely to create new imagery, but coax the painting to life through the gestures of its making.

I create using what I call an “anti-maquette” process, where the model does not lead to an expected result so much as it provides conditions for one. Sculpting the path of a visual landscape by bending, shaping, and warping a material, I emphasize a nonlinear, unpredictable relationship between one plateau of transformation and another. Materials offer resistance when manipulated, forcing me to navigate unknown territory through each object’s creation. The specific nature and preconfiguration of each material becomes a historical fact I have to wrestle with.

My paintings are part of a dialogue with the beginnings of abstract expressionism, distilling an episode in art history in which Jackson Pollock took the rhythms of Thomas Hart Benton’s portrayal of the figure and reenacted them with his own body, creating expansive furling gestures. The resulting skeins of paint can be interpreted as man moving through the landscape.

I am a painter through and through; my work, for a long time, has been focused exclusively on abstract painting contained within the edges of a frame. Oddly enough, limiting my possibilities through palette, paint, and scale frees me to try anything, while concentrating closely on building one exclusive space at a time. I am compelled by the strata and history of the spaces I make with paint; I remove, stack, layer, dig, and remove again to discover unknown places and reveal new sites. My discoveries keep me painting, and I hope that sharing these discoveries through

My artistic practice centers on the remains of the American Civil War, in particular the reenactments that surround it. I started reenacting the Civil War as a mounted cavalry bugle boy at age twelve. Like many who enter the populist subculture of war reenactment, my participation grew from a childhood fascination with the gear, the action, and the epic narrative.

I use color, touch, and physicality to talk about what it feels like to look at things and love them, but not know what they are.

Painting strikes me as the perfect way to address this. It is so dumbly physical yet metaphorical, plus the made-by-hand and passed-person-to-person nature of it feels right.

I work relatively small, but not because I’m trying to be delicate or secretive. It’s because I want the painting to be an object there beside you, with you rather than looming over you. It’s just you and the painting, not you and the painting and everyone else in the room.

Blackness in the twenty-first century is the blackest black that black has ever been. It is the darkest dark—so dark that we cannot discern its shape or form. It exists and extends into infinite blackness—an orchestrally churning sea of blackness. Challenged and encouraged by Langston Hughes’s 1926 The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain, in these objects I attempt to contextualize my identity within a sea of blackness, which is to contextualize my identity within the now. Blackness is complex. It is all things at once. It is rich and sweet, just as it is bitter and tar.

I realized I had a good idea, so I made a painting of it. Then I kept on making more until they became good paintings. Now I have to figure out what I’m gonna do with all these paintings..

My work insists on a new spiritual vocabulary—one that combines aspects of early twentieth-century formalism and contemporary sensibilities about the handmade with a visual lexicon I have developed over the past two decades. This vocabulary is bright, dense, and ornamental, and is punctuated with recurring motifs such as hands, eyes, flowers, planets, mandalas, and goofy smiley faces. Color plays a powerful role in my work, conveying a sense of optical fullness or aesthetic abundance. The laborintensive nature of my practice correlates with a kind of studioinduced