Pentimenti became an obsession.

In Italian, pentimenti means repentance. In painting, it’s those marks that come through from past layers. The idea is that the marks are not intentional events in the final composition.

These works on paper were experimentations on an oxymoron - purposeful pentimenti. I’m not the first painter to do this by any stretch, but I wanted to see if there was a way to approach it without too much contrivance.

How to start, knowing the first marks I make will be hidden and purposeless, potentially harmful to where I could go? How to continue forward, prioritizing a sense of completeness without being precious with past marks? When is the work finished? How do I handle when I’ve gone too far?