“I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” 
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

As a woman, I have to ask myself–what is it for me to make a painting? How do I take part in this male dominated history?

Many white, cis, male, straight ab-ex painters saw painting as something physical and spontaneous. As art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote, “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”  

The canvas here becomes another field to be conquered; an arena to display male (often aggressive) emotion. My own process has become a way to challenge these ideas while still fully embracing abstract painting. 

The act of creating a painting for me begins with creating “brushstrokes” on my iPad. These are nothing more than shapes that I obsessively draw. I have hundreds of them. Then I print out these shapes on a plotter cutter to create stencils. Here I embrace this  machine of mass production as a way to negate the specialness of the marks I create.

The stencils are used repeatedly, over and over, in painting after painting. I am not interested in fetishizing my own emotional freedom through a brushstroke. I am less concerned about making my mark and more concerned with making a mark. 

When it comes to applying paint to the canvas, I use an airbrush. This device enables me to affect the surface of the canvas without ever making contact with it. The paint is not thrown or brushed on, and the act becomes something more ethereal. For me, this is something more akin to respiration. The painting is not wrestled into existence, it is breathed into being. 

And yet, I am still painting, still creating something abstract, still taking part in a conversation that began 40,000 years ago.