I’ll slash a water spill into a wing and smear the wing into a woman. Symbolizing gestures helps me to recognize interconnection—it blurs the boundaries of individual identity. My father taught me to consider interconnection from a young age.

Painting has helped me understand the way things flow and follow. I know I’m done with a painting when the composition fulfills its origins. I think of depth as circular. The ocean crashes into its own substance. My mind folds into itself. Natural cycles carry depth in folds. I can’t create depth—the world already exists as profound—but I can rediscover it (and remember the awe of my naïveté).

I play with the edges of particularity to consider how abstraction begins and ends. This entails watching how a mark bleeds. Sometimes the pigment diffuses. Other times it drops through drips.

It may stagnate.

(Movement tends to depend on how I prime the surface.) My challenge is discovering how bleeding shapes identity.

Watercolor bleeds.

What I want out of a composition is often less interesting than what I’ll notice in its divergence from my intent. I see creation as a reconciliation—meditating in the space between what I want and what is. Surrender to a transitioning, developing reality.

I think there’s a fierce beauty in the bleeding of surrender.