As I struggled with my latest painting, it dawned on me that one of the driving forces behind my art is opposition. I am opposing accident to purpose, chaos to order, precision to casualness. 
Three strong images oppose each other in this current painting: a large square, a large circle, and a large X. They each fight for dominance in the picture plane.
But in addition, the precision of a perfectly drawn circle, X or square are opposed by the casual freehand result, which is off kilter in each case. One of the challenges for me was to make it clear that these imprecise figures were not the result of incompetence, but intention. This is a bit tricky because I did draw them freehand and that’s why they didn’t result in geometric precision. In order to make the “off-kilter” nature of these forms work, “off-kilteredness” had to be an integral part of the entire painting surface.
Thus, a lot of the work on this painting consisted of the back-and-forth of making the three primary shapes dominant, and then over-painting or canceling out that dominance. I added seemingly random or rather, more carefree lines which intercepted my primary shapes to play their own game across the canvas. I worked quickly to create a casualness replete with drips and other evidence of accident.
Sometimes I’m jealous of the rich surfaces on other artists’ canvasses which proclaim the intentional motivation of every pixel of paint. Once in a while I might end up with a canvas like that, but it’s much more likely in my work that if you look closely, you’ll see the sloppy history of previous layers protesting any grand design. If I’d wanted to, of course I could paint over this evidence. But for me the challenge is always how much of it I can leave and still make the painting work.
Sometimes I deliberately highlight the sloppy background by outlining it, thus bringing it to the foreground. I call this “foregrounding indeterminism,” a fancy name for making the accident, or spill, or barely visible background shape suddenly pop up to demand attention. I like to find a way to bring the casual into the sphere of the deliberate, to see what I can discover in these random marks to give them new life in the surface structure of the painting.
When I paint, I’m not thinking about the above at all, I’m just dealing with the particular problem I see in front of me. How am I going to make this damn painting work? It’s only upon reflection, after the fact, that I can interpret what I must have been doing.
