26 September 2025
“I’ve always tried to define parameters for the drawings or paintings according to some organizing principle. It can be anything from an idea about acoustic space to the color range of a particular pigment. The goal is to construct a picture that is autonomous and at the same time suggests multiple associations or readings. That’s the tension, that’s where the traction is. Between image and organizing principle.“—Terry Winters
This quote was included in the release for Table of Contents, Winters's 2021 show at Matthew Marks. It almost exactly articulates what has become my process, though I think about it as more of a three-pronged approach comprised of the foundational image/forms, (flexible but not so much that it relies on the emergence of spontaneous forms to cohere), color, and a formal organizing principle other than color—line, composition, technical application of paint, etc.
For example: tomorrow I'll be going into the studio to begin with a screenshot of a man with his hands bound behind his back from an anti-meth commercial my father directed years ago (foundational image), a work titled Male Nude NM124 (1965 & 1973) by Paul Cadmus (color), and a 1971 intaglio engraving by Dieter Roth titled Little Cloud (organizing principle—line).
While each new work inevitably diverges to some extent in the making, this structure has allowed me to deepen my connection with specific art historical works, which I have to trust as a path toward hacking away the jungle covering what I'm circling around. Which right now seems to be something like the primal sensorial thing that masquerades as a reductive idea of the relationship between the figure and the landscape, or lack thereof.