I do not create to represent the world. I am not particularly interested in reproducing what is already visible. What interests me is the much more complex visual information that appears when I don’t force what I see into something I already recognize.
For decades, my work has developed through a sustained exploration of perception, ambiguity, and the structures that shape human experience. The paintings were never conceived as illustrations of a philosophy. They came first.
Only after years of observing the work and the way people responded to it did I notice a pattern. People would recognize something, but they couldn’t quite identify what they were seeing. I could see the struggle while they searched for something familiar and the image wouldn’t give it to them. Often there was real anxiety within that experience. They wanted to know. They needed the image to settle into something they could identify.
That reaction became important to me. Why was not knowing so uncomfortable? Why did the image have to resolve at all? The perception was still active.
That observation eventually gave rise to Dimensionalism. I began developing the philosophy as a way of understanding what the paintings were already doing.
There is also something more personal underneath this investigation. I have spent much of my life questioning categories I did not choose.
There are countless ways in which identity arrives already classified: by gender, geography, age, social position, culture, profession, economics. These classifications may contain factual information about us, but I have never understood why they should have the authority to determine the limits of what we can become.
The same resistance appears in my work.
I am interested in the moment when something begins to be recognizable but has not yet surrendered to a category.
My paintings do not seek to communicate predetermined meanings, nor do they conceal messages waiting to be discovered. I am not asking the viewer to solve an image or arrive at the correct interpretation.
The artwork remains intentionally open because the observer is not external to it.
The encounter is the work.
Each observer brings a perceptual history, and that history is part of what unfolds. One person may recognize anatomy where another sees architecture. Something can look familiar without becoming identifiable. Recognition can form, disappear and return differently.
I do not consider this instability a deficiency in the experience. I am interested in what remains available because certainty has not arrived.
The forms can possess coherence, spatial relationships and presence without becoming identifiable. This raises another question: if an experience cannot be reconciled with the categories available to us, does that diminish the experience—or reveal the limits of the categories themselves?
Once something has been classified, subsequent information begins organizing itself around that classification. We become very good at finding evidence for what we already believe we have seen.
But what happens to the information that does not fit?
This has become one of the central questions in my practice.
I think of this interval as perceptual latency: the space between recognition and certainty in which the unresolved can remain informationally active. New relationships can appear. An initial reading can collapse. Something previously invisible can suddenly become available.
There is no guarantee that this will happen. The point is that the field has not been closed before it has finished giving us information.
For this reason, I do not think of painting primarily as the transmission of ideas from artist to viewer. I think of it as the construction of a perceptual field in which the artwork and the observer participate together.
The observer is not asked to decode the work. I assume the observer is intelligent, capable of complexity, contradiction and uncertainty without requiring immediate explanation.
Meaning can appear and then disappear. It can change years later because the person standing before the painting has changed.
Or it may never arrive.
That does not make the encounter unsuccessful.
My practice now unfolds across painting, philosophical writing, and the continuing development of Dimensionalism. Together they investigate our urgency to classify almost everything: what we see, other people, their intentions, our circumstances, ourselves, even what we believe is possible, and what we may be missing because we do it so quickly.
This inquiry has increasingly moved beyond the artwork itself.
How much of what we perceive has already been organized by our existing model of reality—by information, culture, previous experience and acquired beliefs? At what point does an interpretation become a certainty? When does a certainty begin behaving like reality? And what information becomes inaccessible once we decide that the question has already been answered?
I do not aspire to represent a particular identity, geography, demographic or category within contemporary art. Those descriptions may be factually true about me. They are not instructions for what I am allowed to investigate.
My commitment is to the inquiry itself.
I create because there are things I do not understand.
Painting has always been the language through which I can stay with those things long enough to see what else might be there.