folding//unfolding

Like with a lot of my paintings, this piece began to take shape the moment that I stopped thinking about it. What I’ve come to realize over the last year or so is that freeform movement of the brush and organic mark making is how I express myself the most authentically in painting. I went into this piece with very little idea of what I wanted for it to be about, but I knew that I wanted to incorporate the bodies and personas that often emerge from my drawings. A lot of this process involved trusting myself, trusting my own intuition and creative instincts. In many ways, painting like this goes against a lot of how I’ve learned to navigate the world. I’ve never really trusted my “gut instincts” because my gut was always filled with obsessions, intrusions, and unfounded fears. In my real life, how I take care of myself is by constantly questioning those impulses, by never allowing my first thought to be the only thought. Some of the darkest periods in my life have emerged from listening to and trusting my own impulses.
I wanted to use slow-drying paints for this project because there’s something much more permanent about oil paint than any other medium I’ve used. Each respective choice made can’t be easily corrected, and colors can more easily muddy each other if overworked. 
Trust is something that I’ve been rebuilding in myself, which is why I chose to present the canvas in a crumpled, folded over and torn state. It’s something that I had previously balled up and discarded, in many ways for my own safety, but have been slowly working to unfold and smooth out. Those creases and marks on the canvas won’t ever disappear, but there’s a beauty to be found in that imperfection, more beauty to be revealed in the imperfect attempt to unravel and smooth the crinkled surface than there ever was in the simplicity of a crumpled ball.