J: In the process of reviewing your past works, we observed a notable shift in your artistic practice. Prior to 2019-2020, the outlines of figures and still-life objects were still identifiable in your paintings. However, your subsequent creations appear to have progressively transitioned toward a more abstract aesthetic. Would you mind sharing more about what inspired this transformation?

E: That’s a good and accurate observation. You’re exactly right about those years. Thank you.  

From about 2016 I was starting to “push into” the painted image, or “move through” it. For about ten years before that, I was simply trying to “execute” an idea and to “render” an image. I worked as an illustrator and still thought about painting in those terms. But by 2016, I started experimenting with a layering process that could partially destroy the image. In those days, I was still cautious, still thinking in terms of “style,” and still pretty attached to painting’s immediate outcomes. I was still involved in the imitation of things I saw in life so that I felt able to judge whether the painting was “good” or “bad.” I hadn’t yet actualized anything that could get underneath and beyond binary judgments. Nowadays I feel like it’s outside my jurisdiction to say whether the work is any good. The work is very much itself, accurate unto itself, and that’s all I can say.

What happened by the end of 2017 is that I experienced a personal crisis which made it clear I could no longer live and make work in Los Angeles or San Francisco, the cities where I had lived and worked for fifteen years altogether. When we landed in New Mexico, it was like starting over. It was a wonderful feeling, actually. In fact, I didn’t paint immediately, but made sculptural pieces. I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t think the first paintings I made there were very good. I had no hope of making a living as an artist anymore (if I ever truly had) or of doing anything that could “matter” in the world. So, little by little, I destroyed more and more in the work. It was cathartic. What difference did it make?  

In 2019, around the time my wife became pregnant, I committed to a meditation practice, and have remained committed over the past five years, while frequently exploring the New Mexico landscape. I had begun writing poetry again, and so much else. All of this would lead me into the Nihil project. The project became, for me, the most meaningful work I’d done up that point, which was an unexpected irony given that I had rejected meaning-making at the outset of the project. I wanted only process and structure to matter. The total contemplative practice that all of this formed was essentially an accidental method of getting myself out of the way in order to more deeply access the Unconscious (one way to put it).  

Among so many things I’d realize over the next four years was that nothing about making and promulgating images was innately all that important to me. What was important was attention to and intention toward a thing, person, creature, place, memory, etc. I wasn’t yet conscious of the way in which prayer was asserting itself within me, as it would still have seemed too irrational to take seriously. But to work with an image by 2020—in the midst of Covid lockdown and leading up to the birth of our daughter—was, for me, to give some time in prayer toward the consciousness of an Other. The attention/intention became more important than the image itself. What this shift in aesthetic and ethical priorities made possible, then, was for another kind of presence to come forward. In the process of working into image after image, and allowing each to recede from sight on a single canvas, an irrational sense of relatedness among those shifting valences felt impossibly real. This new presence was something outside my intellectual grasp, and I was glad for that.              

Edit by Sai, Veronica