When I improvise a certain vocabulary in my painting, it feels less like adopting a style and more like borrowing from my ancestors and my teachers: a way of treating the surface as a dense, stratified field where different  times and registers can sit on top of each other. That improvisation doesn’t just decorate the work; it gives my subconscious more material to work with, letting different histories of painting press against each other in the same image. In that sense different canons are not opposites for me but overlapping coordinates in my positionality; both are sites where “tradition” gets taken apart and rebuilt through attention