I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

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.

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

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.

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

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.