There is a beautiful relationship between erasure and emotion in your paintings. Somewhat paradoxically, it is in part through their absences that the subjects speak—it is because of their erasures that they feel represented in whole. How do you come to the compositional ideas in these emotional renderings? Do you know what will be obscured or absent before you begin?
I build my work bit by bit led by my intuition, choosing areas I am drawn to that reflect a specific emotion that I want to convey from a reference. All the rest may disappear. I never know from the beginning how my work will turn out. I tend to keep my paintings beautiful throughout every step of the process, allowing me to stop at any stage. At the end, the blank parts may “speak” even stronger than the perfectly rendered ones, this puzzled emotional perception interests me hugely.