Process
My process almost always begins on the computer, because the computer is where I feel most fluent. From there, the work moves into print, surface, object, touch, accident, motion, and finally documentation. Each piece becomes a journey between the digital and the physical, between what I can imagine and what I can make real through the tools I have built around me.
I encourage visitors to explore the Progress page, where I share real-time examples of works in development.
1. The Armature
The first stage is the armature: the skeleton, the bones, the diagram of what might happen.
I sit at the computer and play with shapes, lines, curves, symbols, compartments, and strange little systems. Sometimes the composition is very plain. Sometimes it becomes complicated quickly. I am building a landscape, a stage, a structure, or a kind of visual machine that I can keep entering and revising until it starts to feel alive.
I do not think of the armature as an outline, because I often draw through it, interrupt it, ignore it, or let it become buried under other events. It is closer to a map of possibility. It gives the piece a way to begin, but it does not control everything that comes after.
2. The Field
After the armature begins to take shape, I create the field.
The field is not simply a background. It is the world where the armature will live. It may be a room, a space, a color environment, a gradient, a diminished landscape, a reconstructed photograph, a digital texture, or something more atmospheric and difficult to name. It is the first physical commitment I make to the piece.
This stage requires confidence. If I make the field bright red, or deep blue, or quiet and nearly empty, I have to believe that the armature, the painted events, and the dimensional objects can survive inside that world. I spend a lot of time testing texture, brightness, shadow, scale, and atmosphere before the field is printed.
3. The Print
The field is printed on my large-format printer, which is one of the central tools in my studio.
Printing is not just a production step for me. It is a transformation, and it is also a negotiation with reality. Something that looks resolved on the screen can become very different once it leaves the computer and becomes a large physical surface. The scale changes. The color changes. A bright red may not stay the same bright red. I can go back, adjust saturation, contrast, hue, and density, and print again, but I also have to be fair to the physical outcome. Nothing will ever look exactly like it did on the screen, so part of the process is learning when to correct the print and when to obey it.
By the time the field is printing, the piece has already started changing from what I imagined on the screen into what it actually is in the world. That shift becomes the beginning of the next stage.
4. Dimensional Translation
As the field is being printed, I often return to the digital armature with the reality of the print in mind. At that point, I am not only thinking about what looked right on the screen. I am looking again at the shapes, lines, and relationships inside the armature and asking what the physical field now needs from them.
Some shapes may already have the right energy, but need to become more present. Some may need to become stronger, quieter, heavier, or more dimensional in order to support the field that actually printed, not the field I imagined on the monitor. Other times, I realize the armature needs something new: an additional form, a stronger shape, or a dimensional interruption that can hold the composition together once it has entered the physical world.
Those decisions become the basis for the objects I build in CAD. Some forms come directly from the existing armature. Others are created in response to it. This is one of my favorite parts of the process because it captures exactly what interests me: the movement from digital to physical.
A shape that was completely flat becomes an object with height, edge, skin, shadow, and weight. It is no longer only a graphic decision. It becomes something that can cast a shadow, interrupt the surface, and occupy the same world as the viewer.
5. The Objects
Once the dimensional shapes are designed, I print them on my 3D printers.
Most of the time, each object is printed in a single color. I like the clarity and impact of that decision. It allows the form itself to become more present. After printing, I study the objects in the real world and decide how they should behave: shiny or flat, smooth or textured, loud or quiet, precious or strange.
I also experiment with digital skins and textures before anything becomes physical. Sometimes the surface of an object is as important as its silhouette. I want these pieces to feel like they came out of the world of the painting, not like decorations added at the end.
6. The Mark Maker
After the field is printed and mounted onto its final support, I return to the armature in a new way: by drawing it myself.
I generally do not want the armature printed directly onto the field. I want to draw it "by hand," often assisted by projection or reference images. This is where my wheelchair and a device affectionately called the Mark Maker enter the process.
The Mark Maker is a device I created that attaches to my wheelchair and allows me to extend a brush, marker, pen, or other tool out from my body. My eyes are about 85 inches away from the tip of the tool. The device can move up and down and rotate. It is intentionally limited, because my wheelchair is what does most of the movement.
This stage is important because the armature can never return to the perfection it had on the screen. A perfect circle, a crisp hard edge, or a clean square becomes something else once it is recreated through my body, my chair, the distance, the surface, and the tool. The flaws become apparent, but so do the successes. The line records the actual conditions of that encounter.
7. Paint and Pressure
Once the armature is back on the surface, I begin deciding what I am going to do with the piece. The question becomes more urgent: how do I activate this diagram? How do I turn this potential system of biomorphic activity into a painting?
I use acrylic because I like the way it holds body. It can sit on the surface, build texture, catch the movement of the brush, and allow for marbling, dragging, blending, pressure, and interruption. The paint records the way the tool encounters the material.
I am not approaching the paint in the usual way. I am using a system of machinery, body, chair, tool, and surface. The Mark Maker pushes, lifts, rotates, drags, blends, and presses. Many of the decisions begin before the brush ever touches the canvas.
8. Stamps
In addition to painting, I use custom stamps that I design and make myself. The stamps are another layer of skin, pattern, pressure, and complexity. I create molds with my 3D printer, fill them with silicone, and build a growing library of stamp forms in different sizes. I have more than one hundred of them now.
What I love about stamping is that it never gives me total certainty. Sometimes the image is clean and precise. Other times, the paint loads unevenly, gathers in the wrong place, or releases in a way that becomes absurd, abstract, imprecise, or unexpectedly beautiful.
9. Activation
Some works end as painted, printed, dimensional objects. Others ask for another layer of activity.
Because my practice is so invested in the movement between digital and physical space, I sometimes add kinetic parts or animated screen elements. A 3D-printed form may move. A screen may sit behind or within the surface and allow animation to show through the piece.
10. Completion
When the work is complete, I create a certificate of authenticity for it. Each piece receives a certificate and a corresponding seal, linking the object to its record. This final step marks the work as finished and records the fact that all of its translations belong to one piece.