During my second semester at Yale, a critic, Karin, came to my studio and said—as she accelerated her speech like ripping-off a band-aid in a single breath—that I used abstraction to avoid the innermost impulses that motivate me as a maker. I was shaken by self-awareness, she had seen my fear so clearly she could name it and state it out loud. Like mirrored moments in reverse, years prior, a former professor had asked me—why paint about war? Do you listen to sad songs when you cry? This question stayed with me, why was I intent on continuing to think about war and the disappeared? Besides the obvious answer that would be personal history. What is the significance of a bone apart from forensic evidence and psychological closure? These questions have come and gone in my practice for years now. Both Karin and my college professor were brave enough to meet me half-way and speak to me as a peer and in doing so, even if not affirmatively, they recognized my inquiry.
I first leaned into abstraction looking for distance, in an instinct to evade I purposely obfuscated what I myself couldn’t catch. I don’t undermine my earlier self-imposed limitations regarding what I now see as a dialectic between figuration and abstraction. This was necessary to develop a growing awareness as an artist. Now, as a teacher, it’s important to me to scaffold the conception of questions through a student’s own capacities for knowledge-making, those that stem from their own perception and reflection.