In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost; the image buried under layers of brown and green eventually turns up again, thoroughly transformed and transcendent.
The paintings shown here are unusual. They are produced using a subtractive method which is similar to the way a sculptor would carve a figure out of wood or marble: once all the paint is applied I scrape, sand and polish the surface until it is completely smooth, free of brushstrokes and surface imperfections. This tends to abrade and even destroy the imagery, but it enhances the surface and emphasizes the tonal variations and color contrasts of the paint film. The resulting interplay of color and visual texture is always interesting and usually quite complicated. The end result is an elegantly smooth paint surface that looks like terrazzo or polished marble.
