Between the cracks in the pavement on the way to my Brooklyn studio and on the sides of the farm road leading to my small upstate summer studio, blue chicories push through the ground. At dawn, they are bright, warm blue and as the day progresses, they fade into the pale, smokey evening pink. Even when I pull their woody stems out of the dirt and bring them into the studio, their transformation and grasp to life, persists. Observing and painting them daily, I journal the passage of time and the evolution of place, while the paint on my palette and canvas is in continuous motion.

Seasonal portraits with the background of the view from my studio’s window, an annual self-portrait on my birthday, and the cyclic return to painting blooming wildflowers are all part of my ongoing exploration of the tangibility of time. In an era of social detachment, saturated by the depthlessness of rapidly flickering images, I deliberately slow down my practice in order to become intimate with that which is tactile and temporal.

When I mix old dry paint pieces from my palette into fresh paint and work to create a surface that is reminiscent of low-relief sculptures, I think about how the present moment encapsulates different times. Some of my canvases are painted over three or four previous works, some paintings reveal the bare linen surface, marked by a few brushstrokes where I wiped my brushes after finishing a day’s work on a different painting. Over time, as I experiment with the materiality of oil on canvas, the surfaces became thicker and lusher. Therefore, while contemplating the impermanence and fragility of material existence, the completed paintings reflect my labor, my gaze, and my rhythm, in the hope of slowing down the viewer’s experience.