An artist, to me, is someone who transitions an idea into reality with acute accuracy. I don't fully attest to this. Allowing things to come and admiring how they arrive is what I do, naturally. I never actualize an image with full clarity; I slip it from adrift.
The value of the attempt remains. The interpretive eye gives me grace to change. I look often toward the painters and craftsmen, to their resonance of virtue, to the refinement that stretches across years. I feel the need for that same refinement within myself—an evolution of perception that shapes how I make work.
I am motivated by a search for a blend of labor and quality, the ability to reach realism from imagination. I admire the experimental practice of locating a facade of material, translucence, texture, and fabrication.
When light, contrast, and space are woven together with care, I feel a closeness to what I can stir and redefine. Understanding those around me strengthens my own talent. The few I see as perfect remain as guides, and the quest for such accolades of perception is something I cannot relinquish. It continues, underneath everything.
I look for something beyond the physical, beyond labor and detail. I recognize the need for something wider: the collective sense of experience, the reverberation of the human mind, the emotional current between us. These are not separate from my practice.
They return me to the impacts of creativity. As I improve, I see the universal language of comprehension in the work of others. An artist's portfolio reveals their ability to endure, support, guide, and fundamentally, to accept being helped.
Talent, skill, and virtue, if not held with tenderness for life itself, are nearly meaningless. If I do not learn to live with breadth for greater depths, the craft loses its vivacity. What feels most profound comes less from detail and more from an awareness: heart, desire, clarity of the senses.
This is a foundation I rely on. The greatest talents I have seen share in it—a spatial awareness. This balance between being in the work and comprehension outside of it, the awareness of how a thing rests in space and time, is something I chase as a definition of intuitive talent.