Most chaotic painters still keep a safety net.
When I look at a lot of the big chaotic-expressionist painters out there — the ones everyone calls wild — what I actually see is chaos that’s very aware of itself. Their wildness is choreographed. There’s always a structure underneath, a sense of being watched, a performance for the art world. Even at their most explosive, you can feel the calculation. The chaos is staged. And even the painters who lean into a kind of naïve, childlike surface — that loose, playful awkwardness — it’s still highly planned. It looks raw, but you can feel the calculation underneath. The naivety is curated. Every wobble, every oversized figure, every ‘accidental’ line is placed with intention. It’s charming, but it’s not truly unfiltered. It performs innocence. It isn’t innocence.
What I do… it comes from somewhere else.
My work refuses clarity without trying to repair it. I tear things down and build them up again, sure — but not as a method. It’s rupture. The painting collapses because the moment demands it, and it rebuilds because the energy shifts. I’m not correcting. I’m responding.
A lot of artists want to look raw. They perform rawness — messy, but safe. My marks aren’t performing anything. They arrive unfiltered. No cleverness. No academic residue. No panic when the whole thing goes ugly. No smoothing the painting to make it friendly for a viewer.
I don’t even walk into the room where the rules are kept.
That’s the difference.
I’m not breaking rules — I’m simply not negotiating with them. I work in moods, not plans. I know when something is alive or dead, not when it’s ‘right.’ I let the disorder breathe until it clicks in its own strange way.
For me, it’s not chaos with awareness. It’s chaos with exposure. Not directed chaos — released chaos.
Emotionally unguarded. A romance of rupture, of letting the image form through turbulence rather than design.