I use them in this way so that my paintings can be urged, even coerced, into providing the grammar. My understanding of abstract painting is as a generous language, reconstructing and accommodating itself (slowly, perhaps) to interferences from outside its own presumed structure—much like English. Words have the speed of comprehension and visual urgency that is absent in painting, or at least the kind of painting convention that I am interested in working with. The gap between the visual language is probably what initially drew me to pair them.

A dangerous attraction, I find my dialogue, in practice, vacillating between yes, you can...no, you can't. Of course, I want to win the dare. The challenge is to fuse the word into a completely visual and material experience of a painting, and, hopefully, create the equivalent of Franglish, in my case, Paintglish. I do believe that painting language has soft boundaries. I am intrigued by the possibilities of using words as elastically as paint, while employing their demotic power to be concrete, metaphoric, and swift.