I find that there is movement in everything and therefore there are layers in everything. Visible or not, everything leaves its traces, accidental or not, and creates a skin or film of sorts on which something else will build.

Over the last year, after having moved to London, my entire past working process was put into question and thrown to the side, but not away. For good reason. I was forced to focus on what ever I was doing right NOW. I had to start from scratch, build up new techniques and working methods as well as teach myself a whole new language of mark making. This took place through drawings I did while listening to Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I made improvisational drawings where the music or sound heard enforced my hand’s movement, very much like improvisational dance or trying to fit a choreography to a certain rhythm. I stopped the mind from wanting to represent something, from wanting to make a composition and instead allowed it only to follow what it heard. This freed up my mind/hand coordination and allowed me to paint intuitively simply based on what feels right at the present moment.

The current paintings are not made to music, although music is heard. But now the music serves solely as a tool for letting go. It restrains the need to perfect any individual detail or thinking too long before acting. Music brings back memories, therefore it allows for plenty thoughts, and thoughts to happen faster while preventing any lingering on one particular thought.

This way I can make concrete decisions and move quickly from one stage to the next. Should a decisions turn out to have been wrong or rather, unfitting, then its simply changed. But the fact that the decision was made leaves a history, therefore a layer, and this is part of the paintings build up. Without it, it would be a preconceived painting.