I make marks because I have to.

Most artists will say something similar.  Artists are compelled to make art because we know that making art makes us fee good.l   Science agrees.  There is a growing body of research suggesting that the act of art-making itself affects the state of the person making it.  In a 2016 study, Kaimal, Ray, and Muniz found that 45 minutes of visual art-making produced a statistically significant reduction in cortisol.  This research does not attempt to explain what an artwork means, or why one image is more  impactful than another. It supports something more basic: I have a reason to make beyond my phenomenological interest in the nature of image, perception, and the viewing experience.  

The experience is cathartic before it is a photographic inquiry into the phenomenology of image.  And while, I choose the canvas, the materials, the palette, the tool, and the gesture, but I don't know exactly what will happen when those intentions meet the physical world. I make until I experience something I want to keep looking at.

Beauty is my first test.

Only after I have experienced that catharsis does the situation become something I want to investigate photographically.

A little evidence

I don't need to know what the resulting image will be before I begin.