"I learn more from painters whose compositional structure is as apparent as the
subject they paint, such as Piero della Francesca in the 15th century and Balthus in
the 20th century. Another example of this, though more extreme, is Picasso’s Cubist
paintings in which the forms we see might suggest, without fully describing them,
recognizable objects or figures relating to each other and to the vertical and horizontal
edges of the canvas, becoming an image that is about compositional structure.
When making a painting, I am choreographing figures and objects. Every element is a
considered part of the composition, so any line or color, any object or any space
between objects, has been positioned, and then adjusted and adjusted again, and
again, to work in a precise way with everything else."
