I moved.

Post-rut, I had spent a few years away from painting.

I wandered the Met a lot, looking at all the faces of people who once ate, slept and lived lives.

I found my way back by doing portraits of friends and family.

This was less about portraiture and more figuring out my color world and how to deal with paint.

Giacometti’s grumbling about the impossibility of making a head stuck in my mind and took me away from naturalistic skin tones, instead using color as a path to something more abstract.

My skepticism regarding the romance of art marks combined with a desire to push the eye’s focus around the image, lead me to mix techniques from sketched-in to washes to smooth realism in unexpected areas.

The tenet was that “brushstrokes are just another idea”.

I was interested in catching people’s gists as I felt them.

But much more interested in the ways the various shapes and stylistic areas of the paintings clashed and interacted.