On Texture and Scale

I think about a painting as an object before I think about it as an image. The surface has to hold up under direct light, at an angle, from across a room, and from six inches away — those are four different paintings, and I want all of them to work.

I came to painting through photography, and a few years modeling and acting before that. Those aren't separate chapters — the same instincts carried over: how a body or an object holds weight in a frame, where tension sits, what happens right before or after the decisive moment. I'm applying that to paint now instead of a lens.

That's why the work is built in layers rather than a single pass. Paint goes down, gets scraped back, gets built up again. Some of what shows in the final piece is paint I put down weeks earlier and mostly covered. The surface remembers its own history, even where you can't point to exactly what happened.

Color comes second to structure. I'm usually working out a composition of weight and movement first — where the eye enters, where it's stopped, where it's allowed to keep moving — and the palette gets built to support that, not the other way around.

Scale matters more than people expect. A gesture that reads as confident at forty inches can read as timid at sixteen. I paint most pieces at the size they need to be to hold their own weight, which is often larger than what a hobby painter would attempt and smaller than a warehouse-scale statement piece — sized for rooms people actually live in.

I don't start from a fixed idea of what a painting should say. I start from material — how paint behaves when it's thick, how it drags when a layer underneath is still wet, what happens when gold leaf meets a surface that hasn't fully cured. The image is what's left after that process settles.