The act of painting is a necessity for me: what Wallace Steven called “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice”. My paintings record a way of exploring driven by curiosity, experiment, and formal scrutiny. The poetry in my work does not lie in the virtuosity of its construction or in the comfort of a familiar aesthetic. Rather, the poetry in my paintings is the product a continuous chain of decisions, each an uncompromising stab at what will suffice at each given moment. These decisions gather together the time and the necessity of the painting’s making, and it is within the gestalt they form that the poetry of that making resides. Somewhere behind that poetry lies the target I am shooting for in every painting I make: a freedom won through the constant embrace of impermanence, openness, necessity, and play in this world.