Multiple selves make these works. One asks sensorial questions of painting: what feelings, memories, and experiences can I transmit through color and material? I embed the smell of marigolds, the swift temperature change of the California desert, or the thick haze of a three a.m. dance floor make-out. My trusting self follows visions of color and shape, believing that they reveal my ancestry and life experience. At times I search for the painting through my body: I press, rub, and scratch, my actions becoming form-events. Still a fourth self renders and excavates the mythic bodily forms, made not born, who dive through, push, and hold up the paintings. 

The diver form emerged from the inverted triangle of a built-up, cruddy drawing that I made during quarantine last spring. I wanted action, direction, and speed. I began thinking of divers as a digestion of painted bathers; my divers are in motion, active, muscular and gender-fluid. As I iterate this form, the dive becomes a site of projection–a metaphor and the thing itself. The idea of subject-in-process is part of my interest in diving and divers; the dive is the space between ground and abyss, stand and submergence, knowing and not-knowing.