holditorloseit

During a studio visit, my artist friend shared that one of her greatest struggles in painting lies in deciding when a work is complete. While a latent image is fixed onto film the moment an exposure is made, a painting arguably has no such definitive stage of completion. As our conversation unfolded, I began to reflect on the idea of underpainting—the many stages of a painting that remain hidden beneath the surface, excluded because the artist did not regard any of them as complete.

In this series, I am interested in revealing the underpaintings within a painting that would otherwise remain invisible. In collaboration with my artist friend, I documented her process from beginning to end, photographing the canvas whenever I perceived a sense of completion in her work. Using these photographs as raw material, I reconstructed a series of images that are visually similar to, yet conceptually distinct from, the single painting ultimately produced by my friend.