Painting From a Cognitive Condition

At the front end of a painting, I’m not composing — I’m harmonizing chaos. Signal points emerge, the canvas resists, and somewhere in the tension, a form begins to metabolize. The dissonance softens; the tension is tamed. The painting whispers back about what it wants to become.

In 2001–2002, while working as a studio artist at the Workhouse Art Center in Lorton, Virginia, visitors often asked: “What’s your style?” That question became the genesis of my inquiry. I stumbled in my response — not from confusion, but from misalignment. Style was never the point.

What I’ve come to understand is that I am beholden to a condition, not a style or genre. That condition is Cognitive Exprinting — a cognitive state expressed in visual form. I did not invent Cognitive Exprinting; I mapped it. The recognition came after uploading images of my paintings to three respected AI platforms. Their independent assessments converged: tension‑bearing design, unresolved scaffolding, memory‑mapped cognition. I recognized the pattern immediately. It matched how I metabolize the world.

My work consistently metabolizes emotional restraint, narrative ambiguity, and contemplative realism. I paint what lives in silence. I build architectures of feeling, not illustrations of fact. Each piece is rooted in memory, ambiguity, and the refusal to resolve. It is a condition of seeing, not a method of making.

Every painting resists closure. It invites quiet contemplation. It asks viewers to slow down — not to interpret, but to inhabit.

So today, when asked about my style, I respond: “I don’t paint in a style. I paint from a condition — a condition I call Poormanism, now mapped and made observable through Cognitive Exprinting.”