"I paint abstract expressions"

A compact declaration of intent, the phrase compresses a whole practice into three words. To paint is to act, to lay down matter; expressions points to emotion, gesture, and the fleeting signatures of a moment; abstract removes the obligation to depict objects. Together they claim a territory where feeling becomes form without the intermediary of recognizable subject matter.

The wording flips expectations. Rather than abstracting from a thing, landscape, figure, still life, it begins with expression itself and carves away anything that would anchor it too literally. Expressions are plural, signaling a range of atmospheres and temperaments, a catalog of inner weather. The canvas is less a window and more a seismograph, recording intensity, rhythm, and pressure through color, shape, and movement. The subject becomes the act: the push of a brush, the velocity of a line, the vibration between hues. Paint is not merely a vehicle but a living participant, pooling, resisting, bleeding, drying in time.

There is also a sly echo of a movement without claiming it outright. Abstract Expressionism looms in art history, but the phrase sidesteps dogma. It stresses experience over lineage, process over pedigree. It suggests a freedom to borrow the immediacy of action painting while embracing discipline, editing, and quiet passages where the gesture breathes.

For an artist with roots in performance, expressions carry a second meaning: the face, the body, the register of feeling in motion. Translated to canvas, that becomes choreography in pigment, a rehearsal made permanent. Yet abstraction avoids illustration, protecting mystery and inviting the viewer to co-author meaning. What looks like a sweep of cadmium might be rage, release, or sunlight to different eyes, and all readings can be true.

Ultimately it is a vow to paint not what is seen but what seeing feels like, a practice of distilling the ephemeral into a physical residue, where the finished work is the afterimage of an encounter between impulse and material.