As winter melted and spring brought forth abundance of flowers, I painted my rose garden. The physicality of oil paint lends itself to well to my applying paint both thinly and thickly, scraping and reapplying paint. The surfaces of my paintings resemble ancient walls, in that there is a sense of history alive in them, through the repetition of the "placement and replacement" of paint many times over. (I try to convince my students that they can’t expect to get it right the first hundred times, that it is necessary to go through the search process). I feel like I am at a construction site breathing life onto the canvas through a simultaneous building up and a tearing down of color. A painting gets born when it has a specific presence that comes alive in it, that seems, for me, to come together only at the very end through the last accoutrements that come along so naturally and pleasurably, and fine-tune all that is already compositionally holding together, rhythmically tied.