Nothing I paint survives if it isn't alive first. Human, animal, a presence, it doesn't matter which, as long as something in it breathes. I call it a living anchor.

The crystal water of Sardinia stays with me, the orange trees of Genoa, the design instinct of Milan, the free spirit of Amsterdam, where I also spent time around the Rietveld Academie. Copenhagen is where I live and paint now.

There's a part of my mind that wants precision and control, the kind that needs to know an answer before it emerges. Painting is where I found a way to disarm it. Oil helps because nothing is ever finally wrong, every mark can be gone back into, but that's not the reason I paint, it's what let me actually risk it. I work in near-dark, on purpose, to keep that controlling part from taking over the room, then bring the light back on to judge, correct, or call something finished.

A passage that resists doesn't get fought. It gets set aside, or wiped and restarted, dialogue instead of combat. I paint on wood I find rather than buy, I'd rather search for the surface than order one, and on some pieces I work both faces of the same board, a bidirectional process where the painting can hold two readings depending on how it's turned. I've come to call this arte implicata, work that implies rather than states outright, closer to a presence than a description.

Some of what I finish stays open on purpose. Grief has moved through the work more than once, and I've learned finishing something like that can feel like grief and relief at the same time, not one or the other. A viewer will often see something in a piece I didn't consciously shape. The painting keeps growing past the wood and pigment where it started, whenever someone standing in front of it has something of their own life to bring to it.

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Exhibitions

Online Arte Laguna World, Venice, Italy

Lines, Shapes & Objects – Fusion Art (Finalist) Online Exhibition , US (2025)

Echoes of Being – Naatiatelier, Haarlem, Netherlands (2024)

Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2015)

GOOD 50x70 – Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy (2009)

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