The process of painting begins the moment I enter the studio. My studio is like a private garden for me, and I work in it as does a gardener (to paraphrase Miró), attending to this or that work, developing meaning and form as paintings in different stages grow together and come into their own. The paintings develop as singular works but also often as part of groups (often triptychs) or series. Each work opens a window onto a distinct world of emotion, memory, and embodied conocimiento (understanding).

I explore materials constantly, particularly since it is through such exploration that images and sense arise. At the same time, the materials are at the heart of my work. I paint on paper, canvas, or linen.  I work with acrylic, oil, charcoal, watercolor pencil, often mixing gesso and adding sand and marble dust.

Color or a pallet create mood and affective modalities that may inspire drawing, marking, and the making of an image. In painting and drawing I am always aware of the three-dimensional character of the images, their density, materiality, and transparency or opacity; at this level cutting, carving, shaping, and painting with my bare hands are fundamental. In some ways I would say that often I paint guided not by my eyes but by my whole body, through a kind of wholistic seeing in which gestures, marks, and surface making happen through movement and rhythm.

I have been captivated by color and light since I was a child. I imagine that part of this was that as a child I could already only see shadows with my left eye while I saw fine with the right eye. This shadow became blindness in the left eye by the time I was fifteen. This process of shadow seeing and the memory of loss have created an ever-dynamic experience in the way I perceive the world. I never feel I see the whole, I always have a sense of loss in seeing, and yet, seeing is to me most wonderous: Light stands for me as glimpses of hope. Along these lines, working through the materiality of painting figures for me a journey from the depth of earth elements to light. Materials come to shine and thus speak in the paintings. Water, turpentine, oils, resins, are for me liquid elements that echo and enable the movement of light, they are enriching mediums of seeing. At the same time, my ability with words sinks onto the density of the materials when I work, and I seek to learn to draw meaning from the silence of material density, texture, lightness, transparency, and resistance.

My task is to learn to see again and again. My hope is that I can communicate this desire for light at the edge of seeing to those who come across the works I make.