Brushwork Series I

The question came out of a conversation about the invisible: what if the subject of a painting was the act of painting itself?

Not in a theoretical way. Literally — what if the mark the brush makes, the specific character of a loaded bristle dragged across a surface, was the thing being studied?

I'd been making work about other things my whole career. I wanted to make work about this. The brush, the medium, the surface, the pressure, the speed, the hesitation, the confidence — all of it, made visible and honest.

The hardest part of the Brushwork Series wasn't technical. It was psychological.

I had to unlearn the impulse to control. Every mark I made wanted to be in the service of something else — a form, a space, a colour relationship. For this series, the mark had to be the end point, not a means to one.

I worked through thirty failed starts before I found the first piece in the series. Each failure taught me something about my own habits — the way I default to suggestion rather than declaration, the way I manage the brush rather than listening to it. The series began when I stopped managing.

Somewhere around the eighth session, something shifted.

I stopped thinking about what the brush should do and started paying attention to what it was doing. The way a flat bristle fans at the end of a long stroke. The dry edge of an almost-empty load. The weight difference between a brush in the air and a brush on the surface — that resistance, that give.

I understood for the first time that a brush has a voice. Every brush is a different instrument. I'd been playing them all in the same key. This piece, finally, let each one speak as itself.