When you start a new work or project, do you plan what you’re going to create or do you improvise?

In my current work, I combine both spontaneity and planning within my creative process. In recent months, I have begun to organize my process into three stages. I start by researching a topic and materials through readings, talks, and visiting key places. Once I feel I have enough information, I channel it into multiple quick drawings. This part of the process is really free and anything can happen. After that I translate my favorite drawings into digital ones before painting from them. This final step is the most planned, although there are always variations between the digital version and the final painting.

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Can you highlight some of your influences and discuss how your influences have made an impact on you and your practice?

I have noticed that my work has been hugely influenced by the places I have lived in, the way I am forced to move through space, the architecture, the colors, the people around me, their way of life, their concerns, the ideas of the moment, and the art of the place. I believe this shows through my work in aspects such as the imagery and colors I use as well as in the scale and materials of my paintings. Artistically, perhaps my most immediate and significant influence comes from Picasso and his explorative boldness towards art making. I admire his courage to move in the direction his curiosity took him. Philip Guston’s search for creative freedom while moving from abstraction to figuration has also been influential in my attitude to making art. I am also passionate about medieval painting and Sienese painting. I find these works to be very inventive and original in the strategies they use to tell stories.