When I first discovered the idea of a painting as a window, I was pulled in by what possibly existed beyond the window frame. Did the picture extend in all directions? If so, how far? By cropping a view of something larger, the picture frame, to me, suggested an infinite landscape. It’s that infinite landscape that has captivated my attention ever since — not because I am compelled to understand it, but rather because I cannot.

Even though I cannot understand it, I can still feel it — and it feels like a roller-coaster ride. When my feet are back on the ground, my engagement with infinity is an engagement with my own finiteness. My line can go only so far. My brushstroke can last only so long before it dies. Every action has to have a beginning, middle and end. My paintings, like my life, are finite within infinite surroundings.

In this process, I have arrived at a few approaches:

• I think of a painting not as scenes or pictures, but as a record, like a book or a musical score. As a result, the structure of my paintings is often a single path that begins and ends on the canvas.

• The path is made up of segments, like parts of a sentence, with clear transitions from one to the next. 

• Brushstrokes are the vocabulary of the segments. They consist of groups of parallel lines resembling barcodes. In Euclidean geometry, parallel lines are lines that never intersect, regardless of how far they are extended. 

• I choose colors based on their vibration, rather than any reference to my visual environment. 

• Scaling up from small paintings to much larger ones provides an analogy to vaster scales. I mine the seemingly microscopic details of my smaller paintings — as if they were nature itself — and try to reproduce them, a process that introduces new variations and accidents.