Do you learn something new about her each time? Or maybe you understand her more deeply with each portrait?
Yeah, absolutely. Every painting of her is different. I don’t calculate what she’s going to look like or what the finished painting will look like either, and I love to find out things about her by painting her. A friend visited my studio recently and just by walking around, she could unpick every stage of our relationship by looking at the paintings… This is when I fell in love with her, this is when we were fighting, this represents her sassy side… Sometimes I would also try to sort through emotions or even fights through painting her. But then we reconcile halfway through, it goes from angry painting to sweet painting. There are layers of anger underneath the love in some cases. But I guess that’s what life is, right? It’s ultimately positive, but it’s also not so clean cut. It’s a very human relationship and I think life is more beautiful when someone isn’t agreeing with you all the time. That’s all reflected in the paintings.
It’s an exploration in devotion, both to your work and to your partner.
I think devotion is so interesting. There’s this person I want to be with for the rest of my life, and that reminded me of the feeling I had when I couldn’t get out of painting. It was this realization that this was now my life, you’re almost stuck in it. There’s no other way of thinking, you know what I mean? I’m culturally catholic, for example, and so there’s this idea that you go back to God, and you express your love for God with adornment. And I think I’ve carried that into my paintings, like everything is about adornment. I’m adorning Lilah in my work. I’m adorning the very act of painting and I think that’s how I break down devotion.
Earlier you mentioned the layers of paint built up over the course of your process, and some of your works are painted so thickly that they almost seem to grow off the canvas. Is that what you mean by adorning the act of painting?
I used to have a great obsession with my studio, and when I was using un-stretched canvas, I used to just let my paintings bleed off the canvas onto the walls. I loved the marks of things in a space. And I think some of that came from architecture school, but mostly it was just fun to see how painting was a testament of my life. There are traces of an artist living and breathing in this space and spending the whole day there, every day. When I was preparing for my recent show at Saatchi Yates, I used some stretched canvases but then I would wipe my palette knife off or my brushes off on the sides of the frame so it sort of had this record of all the decisions I’d made. I just liked the idea of the margins having a presence as well because these are impasto paintings, you have to move around them and see them from different angles to get the best sense of them.
