Having bought the colours, an easel, and a canvas, the next step was to begin. But what a step to take! The palette gleamed with beads of colour; fair and white rose the canvas; the empty brush hung poised, heavy with destiny, irresolute in the air. My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto.

Yeah, I think it’s a combination of all those things, really. I think narrative is significant and important to me. And I think most of the narratives that really struck me were about history or were narratives that I received in ways that were abstract, so they were kind of nonlinear narratives that I pulled from, for example, music. You know, music was a huge inspiration to me growing up, I grew up listening to a lot of reggae music, a lot of dancehall, dub. If you listen to that music, I think one of the things you realize is that those particular artists, those legendary artists who were making that music in the ’70s and ’80s, and even to some degree in the ’60s, were really good at provoking you to go on your own journey with the information that they were giving you in the music. For me, one of the things about artistic practice is not about providing some solution, but instead provoking curiosity about some things that you should find on your own and not be led to.

I was about to answer cheesily, “It starts me,” but it actually does. I search. I put in a lot of time reading, taking notes, writing in that grasping way that feels mostly wrong. Usually it begins with an image and then the voice comes. Once I have the voice, the book presents. Annie Ernaux talked about it as channeling, and I don’t want to over romanticize it, because there’s a lot of bodily discipline that goes into the making. But I do think that, for me, that’s how a first draft feels. It’s like just keeping up with the voice in my head, being true to it, clinically so—like a pact. I love that first draft, because it’s pre-scrutiny, pre-analysis.

When I start out to make a panoramic piece, I often work from left to right. But when a small scrap of a drawing turns into a giant drawing the progress is less linear, a more intuitive process. “Untitled (Color Kitchen)” started with the flowers. Mariah Corrigan cut me these beautiful old roses, which I put in a yellow pitcher. The next day I was all packed up and walking out the door to go to my studio when I saw the roses and thought, “Those flowers are going to be gone by tomorrow.” So I stayed home and painted them just to always remember them. Eventually the drawing grew to include the table, the wall, the curtain, and the next wall