Two Ways of Surrendering
I have never thought of myself as someone who makes paintings. I think of myself as someone through whom paintings pass.
Fragment of Thought, 6×6 ft, Abstract Inquiry Collection
This is not a romantic idea. It is a practical one, born from years in the studio watching what happens when I insist on controlling a canvas versus what happens when I step back and let the work find its own form. The paintings that stay with me — the ones that still surprise me when I look at them — are never the ones I willed into being. They are the ones that arrived while I was paying attention.
Over time, this understanding has crystallized into two distinct bodies of work: Abstract Inquiry and Organic Movement. They look different. They feel different. They are made differently. But they share a single conviction: that the artist's deepest act is not expression, but receptivity. In both collections, I am not the origin of the work. I am its passage.
What separates them is the nature of the surrender.
Abstract Inquiry — Listening Until It's Done
In Abstract Inquiry, I am present. Fully present. I come to the canvas with oil, with acrylic, sometimes both within the same piece — and I begin without a predetermined image. There is no sketch, no plan, no color story decided in advance. What I bring is attention.
Abstraction, I have learned, has its own momentum. It moves toward something before you can name what that something is. My role is to stay attuned enough to feel the direction — to make a mark, step back, read what the canvas is telling me, and respond. Not react. Respond. There is a difference. Reaction is ego. Response is dialogue.
The work proceeds this way, in long, slow conversation, until something shifts. A quiet descends over the surface. The painting stops asking for anything more. I don't decide it's finished — it tells me. And I have learned, sometimes painfully, to trust that signal rather than override it with one more layer, one more adjustment, one more assertion of my hand.
This mode of working has a lineage. I think of Mark Rothko, whose late canvases transformed color into something closer to atmosphere — where the painter became a kind of priest, present and effaced at once, holding a space for feeling to arise. I think of Hilma af Klint, who understood herself as a receiver of forms that preceded her, that existed in some register she was simply organized enough to access. Abstract Inquiry belongs to that tradition. The abstraction was always there. I am the one who showed up to usher it in.
Organic Movement — Handing the Brush to Gravity
Organic Movement begins with a different kind of disappearance.
Here, I set down the brush entirely. Thread, string, rope become the primary instruments — placed, poured, dragged across the surface. I tilt the canvas. I introduce paint and step back. And then physics takes over in ways I cannot predict and would not want to.
Gravity pulls the oil in directions I didn't choose. Viscosity slows a line or accelerates it. Thread catches pigment and carries it somewhere unexpected, leaving behind a gesture that is wholly its own. I am not making marks. I am creating conditions under which marks make themselves. The difference is everything.
There is lineage here too. Jackson Pollock understood that the space between intention and accident was where painting lived — that you could choreograph a process without choreographing its outcome. Sam Francis went further still, trusting the movement of paint as a meditative act, letting the physical nature of the medium carry the meaning rather than simply deliver it. In Organic Movement, I am working in that same spirit. The medium is not a vehicle for my intention. The medium is the intention. I surrender the outcome and find, in that surrender, something I could never have invented.
Two Surrenders, One Practice
People sometimes ask me which collection I prefer. It is the wrong question — like asking whether I prefer listening or breathing. Both are necessary. Both are how I stay alive in the studio.
What unites Abstract Inquiry and Organic Movement is not a shared technique or a shared aesthetic. It is a shared posture: the willingness to be moved by something other than your own agenda. In one, I listen my way into it. In the other, I let go my way into it. In both, the painting knows more than I do at the start.
I am the medium. The abstraction is what passes through.
