The history of abstraction—especially the storied past of abstraction painted in the 20th-century by emotionally fragile white men—is a weight that I will never be able to escape. So, I’ve surrendered to the fact that my paintings cannot save the world, regardless of what others might try to assert about their own work.

Instead what I’m interested in is inserting myself into the canon by doing what all painters have always done: stretching canvas over wooden frames, pushing paint around, scribbling, smearing, building, subtracting, erasing, tearing away, and beginning again. That process, that ritual, that notion of psychology embedded in material and object makes me believe—at least for a fleeting moment—I can transcend my own limitations as a human being making art. How an image can at once seduce, conceal, beguile, and put a mirror up to us as emotional, reckless, and deeply flawed people is a concept that simultaneously fascinates and eludes me, and it is what keeps me making work.