I don’t remember deciding to work this way.

 

At some point it simply became necessary.

 

A painting begins ordinarily enough.

 

I work on it for days, sometimes weeks or months. I learn its surface. I finish it.

 

For a while, that can be enough.

 

Then something changes.

 

A finished painting has an image, but it hasn’t necessarily had a life.

 

So I return to it.

 

There are certain things I repeat.

 

Certain colors.

 

Certain faces.

 

Certain rooms and arrangements that have followed me for years.

 

I don’t remember choosing all of them.

 

There are rules too.

 

I don’t remember making those either.

 

Sometimes a finished painting disappears beneath another finished painting. Sometimes this happens more than once.

 

Sometimes I wrap one in black plastic and leave it somewhere.

 

Sometimes water is involved.

 

Sometimes heat.

 

Sometimes I use a stone.

 

The stone matters.

 

I don’t make its edge. It arrives that way.

 

Whatever happened to it before I found it is already there. Pressure. Weather. Other surfaces. Things I will never know about. Its edge is the result of a history that happened without me.

 

The painting has one too.

 

When the two meet, neither history disappears.

 

They simply become part of what happens next.

 

The stone leaves something behind. The painting does too.

 

Neither is exactly what it was before.

 

I like that.

 

Then I leave the painting alone.

 

Eventually I come back.

 

I look at what remained.

 

Some things disappear completely. Others survive in pieces. Occasionally something I thought I had covered finds its way through a later surface.

 

I’ve learned to leave some of those things alone.

 

They were there first.

 

Then I begin again.

 

I work around what happened rather than trying to return the painting to what it was.

 

Returning it would be impossible anyway.

 

A scar can be covered, but that doesn’t make the surface beneath it the same surface it was before.

 

A face can disappear beneath another face and still be there.

 

An entire painting can exist underneath the painting you are looking at.

 

Nothing painted over is really gone.

 

It simply changes where it lives.

 

I could imitate most of this.

 

I could paint a scratch.

 

I could manufacture age.

 

I could make something new appear as though it had a past.

 

But that has never felt quite the same.

 

The appearance of an event and the event itself are two different things.

 

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, the painting has to remember it even if nobody else can see it.

 

So the process repeats.

 

Make.

 

Finish.

 

Cover.

 

Leave.

 

Return.

 

Repair.

 

The details change.

 

The sequence has remained strangely familiar.

 

There is something deeply personal about knowing everything that has happened to an object when the person standing in front of it knows only its present condition.

 

I know which face came first.

 

I know which painting is underneath this one.

 

I know what disappeared.

 

I know what came back.

 

And I know which marks I could have removed but didn’t.

 

Maybe that is why I have never been particularly interested in making something untouched.

 

Untouched things have very little to tell me.

 

I am more interested in what happens afterward.

 

What remains after something has been changed.

 

What a thing becomes when returning to what it was is no longer possible.

 

Whether a consequence has to be destructive simply because it is permanent.

 

Whether something can be changed by what happened to it without becoming only what happened to it.

 

Whether something can carry all of its previous versions without being reduced to the worst one.

 

I don’t think the final painting is beautiful despite what happened to it.

 

I think separating the two would be impossible.

 

The stone is somewhere else now.

 

It has continued having a life of its own.

 

So has the painting.

 

For a moment, their histories crossed.

 

There is evidence of that meeting in both of them, whether anyone can see it or not.

 

By the time someone sees the painting, they are looking at the last moment in a history they weren’t there for.

 

They see the painting.

 

I see everything underneath it.