Why I destroy my paintings

I very intentionally paint somewhere between realism and abstraction. I destroy parts of my images, and then "fix" them, and then make more deliberate mistakes. I want the piece to surprise me, to not feel fixed, or locked in. I don't want it to feel like a photograph, I want the movement and life present in mistakes and imperfection to be a main character in every painting.

I also very much want clear evidence of brush marks, of palette knives, of the tools used to physically spread and move and blend the oil and pigment on the surface. I want you to feel like you know what motions were used to create each brush stroke, to know the feeling of picking up and touching the painting without needing to actually do so. I want each piece to feel like a living entity, taking up space in a room, the subject's expression or mood adding to the feeling within the space.

The reason I do this is that I want you, the viewer, to finish my painting for me. If it was a perfect photographic representation you would get everything you need from it from a mere glance. But because of the introduced mess, the incomplete elements, the brush strokes and unrefined abstraction, your mind has to complete the image – it fills in the missing elements every time you look at the painting. This makes each piece a collaborative effort; I create the foundation and you complete the painting with your own experiences, memories, projections, desires. It's a new painting every time, and entirely unique to you. 

This excerpt from Philip Glass on composing music for film expresses this beautifully:

"[when I compose music for films,] I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.”"

My aim here is to, hopefully, cause a space that you, personally, need to fill, meaning that you learn a little more about yourself, or feel more connected to yourself. The painting gets given its meaning by you, and as such becomes meaningful to you.