“Potato” (2026-Present)

I started a single small potato painting in January 2026, from life, from a lone potato that fell to my feet one day as I opened my mom’s holiday-stuffed fridge.

By March, I had about a dozen paintings of that same potato (and just as many that I had overworked and tossed). I was feeling a real tension in my process, though. My original goal for the paintings was to be legible with as little rendering as possible. The sticky notes in my studio had words like: “washy, delicate, fragile, playful, immediate, imprecise”. But, I also knew that much more was possible in terms of color and light if I could keep rendering and building layers. So, I had the paintings photographed, and I created a set of pigment prints - Epson prints on Hahnemuhle’s 100% cotton photo rag paper - from those digital images. This paper happens to be great for drawing. I then went to work directly on those prints, now with colored pencil instead of paint.

I added many, many interwoven layers of colored pencil on top of the printed images. In several cases, I made multiple different finished drawings over the same original image. I had multiple ideas for how I could “finish” the image from a certain point (green light vs pink light vs friendly vs grotesque, etc). Drawing directly on top of the prints allowed me to play with all these different end points, while still protecting the original painting. The fact that I was able to start from the exact same image each time became important. I could explore -exactly- what x, x, and x colors would do from that point forward, and then physically see the end results side-by-side. Also, the colored pencil itself allows for a level of intimacy, nuance, specificity and depth that just isn’t part of my painting process (which errs on the side of loose and energetic).

For some of the images, I did this whole process more than once. I added as much new color to the print as I could, literally until the paper was starting to tear. Then I re-photographed and re-printed that current version of the image, and went to work again with the pencils. This process has become one of the most important in my whole practice, to the point where I now see the potato paintings as just a step within a larger creative process. However, I don’t consider the paintings incomplete. The paintings, for me, are about coherence with as little as possible, whereas with the print-drawings my goal is ‘as much as possible’ … following an idea all the way to its end point. The paintings and print-drawings are just different ways of seeing the same thing.

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Edited August 6th, 2026