I work in ink and watercolor, almost always in a notebook — a format that shapes everything about how I make and think about art. Each page is a world unto itself, and sometimes two pages open together become something a single page cannot hold. The notebook is not a sketchbook. It is the work.
For years my process began without intention. I would fill a page with colors that felt right — shapes chosen for their compositional potential, edges kept soft, colors allowed to meet and blend. Then I would look. I called it cloud-watching: finding the image already latent in what I had made, then refining it across layers until something clear emerged. Only at the end would I take a fine ink pen and firm up the edges, anchoring what the color had suggested. It was a way of listening to my subconscious before I knew what it was saying.
The work has changed. I still use ink and watercolor, still live inside the notebook — but now I begin with a feeling made as specific as I can manage. Not a broad emotional category but a precise internal state: the particular texture of a given moment, the exact shape of what I am carrying. I sketch that feeling in metaphor rather than description, work out the composition in detail, and then commit to the ink first — permanent, expressive, unforgiving — before the watercolor follows. Sometimes loose washes and layered shapes; sometimes flat fields of color brought into form by shadow alone.
What connects these two ways of working is a consistent destination: emotional honesty. The earlier process found it by accident, through excavation. The current one reaches for it directly. The work has acquired a more deliberate edge as a result — not because any particular emotion dominates, but because precision requires commitment. Self-portraiture has become central to the practice, not as documentation but as a way of holding experience at arm's length long enough to see it clearly.
The notebooks accumulate. Each one is a sequential record — not a diary, but something close to a visual memoir. The order matters. A piece on page twelve exists in relation to the one before it and the one that follows. Taken apart, the individual works stand on their own. Left together, they tell the story of the years in which they were made.