I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.