Obliteration

Obliteration is a series of oil paintings made on top of older canvases the artist no longer wanted, each one painted over with short, rapid, heavily loaded strokes until the original image could no longer be seen. Made during a turbulent period, the work became a kind of release: the old paintings were something to push against, to react to, and finally to erase, so that something new could begin on top of the past without being shaped by it. The strokes gather in swarms, drift in diagonal currents, or burst outward from a center, piling color on color until the ground disappears. Yet what lies beneath is still there, unseen but essential, the resistance that made the new surface possible. The series traces a full turn of the wheel, arriving back where it began, but changed.