I was having a conversation with a friend last year, and at some point in the discussion we started talking about how painting is like sex. He probably offered the comparison, but I had to nod in agreement. There’s something about the physicality of the paint and the process, and although that’s what our discussion focused on, I thought of the comparison in wider sense. I have a relationship with the painting, a kind of bond that begins, grows and ends. With any romantic relationship, an attraction is nurtured and could become intense, but that intensity withers and fades and the involvement inevitably ends. The middle stage of painting is usually trance-like and physical, as with the middle of a relationship when attraction becomes the most comfortable and free without hesitation. An end to a boy and I has always been slow and gradual, like the placing of final details in a face or on a button in a portrait. When I finish a painting I feel a great sense of release and emptiness, and although detachment settles in I always have a fragment of identity with the piece, like the influence people have on each other that exists as slivers of memory when they’re gone. I look at a painting I’ve finished and it troubles me that I can’t remember exactly how I built up the stages to find its final place, but that’s what interests me about painting. Each one is a new experience and I forget how to paint all the time. The painting sits there while I sleep, eat, read and dance in front of it; it waits for me when I run errands and sits heavily on my mind when I’m away and not working on it. It becomes more than an object and begins to blossom with me. We live together but at some point the work in progress will be gone, the stages finished, the boy will leave and I'll put the painting with the others and yes, I made that, and yes, we were together once.