The first thing that jumps out when I look around at your work today is this truly incredible palette. The hardest thing for me to get my head around in art school was color theory. The way you use color seems so thoughtful— how did your creative process develop?
With color theory, when you first start painting, you just buy the primary colors, but the longer the continuation of the experiment is all about readjusting. Every time you paint it's a synthesis of all your successes and the materials that you like. It's a combination of all these little techniques too, in order to make a good painting. So with color, it's kind of been a building process.
What’s your favorite color?
[AR points to a streaky blend of green and blue]
My favorite colors are ones that are a mixture— the moments where it's kind of gross and grimy, almost not artful. Ten years ago, if I was painting, doing stuff like that, it would've been everywhere. There is an elegance, an unconscious movement towards “oh, this blue and that green” that happens without really trying, and those are the colors that you rub out together.
In the full process of making a piece, color choice and beyond, how much do you plan it out? How much is strategy and how much simply “flows”— for lack of a better word?
With all my paintings, I try to convey a sense of tenderness. It has to come from a reflective, slowed down feeling— I think of it as opening up your heart in a way. Sometimes you don't feel like being sentimental or emotional, and we can't get into that channel all the time, or care to. But that's what painting requires from you. Thinking about life, relationships, and the temporality of things. Those feelings have to be in your space so that the lines can be tender in that manner.
It probably involves a lot of mindfulness, and life balance, involving emotion in your career. Are there other mediums that you seek for inspiration? I hear you play guitar.
I'm annoyingly interested in music, but honestly, I kind of cringe when I hear artists talk about music. I try to talk about the paintings without bringing in music, but sometimes before I go paint or do anything like that, I need to calm down. I just play guitar, just soloing over music, improvising. I like to think that it does make your brain more lucid. Painting, for me, I have to get into a zone. I have also taken on a 24 hour job of watching YouTube videos. Lately, it’s David Foster Wallace interviews.
I’ve definitely been down that wormhole before. It’s wild watching the way he uses language so carefully, in real time, and also seeing his neuroses in full force.
I have been thinking, in poetry, whether it be David Foster Wallace, or Conor Oberst, it really is so much about carefully combining very separate seeming ideas, like, "Oh, I'm thinking about my mother's house, but then I'm thinking about this nuclear explosion." I see a parallel with that in painting— you could just do an easy, quick brushstroke, or you could start slowing down. You can dig in and say, "With this one line, I'll create the tension and edges, and the next line is going to come really close, but not touch it." There is function when you feel it more.