The conventions of painting seem to me both seductive and suspect. As a believer confronted by my own limitations, I resort to looking for loopholes, a way out of my aesthetic quandary. To me, painting is like Japanese, my first language, now forgotten, which I speak only in dreams. The only way out of this disjunction is to embrace ignorance, start over and (re)discover what I might already know. This provisional state has filtered into my work so that my days in the studio feel makeshift. The means seem less important than the meaning. Paint becomes more utilitarian and less aesthetic, about gravity rather than culture.