This is a painting I made in my studio in Lowell, MA in November, 2017. It is a layered composition making use of a variety of techniques I have developed over a number of years.

I began this painting by doodling on raw, unstretched canvas set on top of my work table with a handful of paint markers. I drew lines, scribbles, and some text, including the text which became the title of the piece, "none of it makes any sense", of which you can still make out "it makes any sense" in the upper left corner. This particular string of words is borrowed from a podcast about Star Trek, which in turn borrowed it from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the first officer is led to believe that he is in a mental institution and has hallucinated his experience as an officer in a space faring military organization. The podcast uses it to critique a scene in the new Star Trek series in which one of the main characters is making the claim that all his species is good for is to sense when they are about to die. You can take my use of it here to mean what you like.

I've been using a process of creating layers with different techniques and here on top of the first layer of doodles I have wet the canvas with water, pushing the water into the fibers with a silicone sculpting tool, and then applying high flow acrylic which the water pulls into the canvas creating a sort of died effect, with nice gradients and a watercolor like appearance such as you can see in the orange in the upper right.

On top of this, I've applied a sequence of layers using the silicone sculpting tool, pouring, and dripping paint and media. The final layers are clear acrylic pouring media with black, white, and silver fluid and high flow acrylics dripped into it.

I am interested in how the different layers interact with each other and play off of each other, and am working with the tension between the parts of the canvas which are untouched, like the middle top where you see the beige of raw canvas and the bottom right where layer after layer is piled on top of one another.