“The more I paint, the more I believe what Stéphane Mallarmé described to Edgar Degas regarding Degas's struggle with creating a poem, Although Degas' head was full of ideas, Mallarmé responded: "But my dear Degas, poems are made of words, not ideas!"

​

It is not to say I don't have any ideas; on the contrary, my belief is that engaging in the painting process will be what determines the work. By engaging directly with painting or drawing, I simultaneously engage in creation and negation until the work is somehow mediated. For me, this is the necessary tension from which everything emerges, at various speeds. I may want to go a certain way but the painting thinks differently. I'll never understand, and I do not need to. 

 

"...Another reason you should turn

Your attention to the motes that drift and tumble in the light:

Such turmoil means that there are secret motions, out of sight,

That lie concealed in matter. For you'll see the motes careen

Off course, and then bounce back again, by means of blows unseen..."

 

Lucretius, The Nature of Things, Book II: The Dance of Atoms