I try to leave paintings in the “ala prima” stage, where I spend an hour or two at most working on them, the paint still wet. Mostly I paint from photographic resources and memory: my own, and found images on Google search. The seemingly arbitrary nature of how images are paired in internet searches inspires my work. I obsessively screenshot my friends’ social media posts as reference materials, and I equally obsessively don’t share my daughter’s face online. I have finally found a censored way to paint her, through pixelated images. The element of color theory, as I mix each square, with the image devoid of any figure/ground drawing hierarchy due to the pixilation is a relief and burden. Whether rerendering images from an algorithm or my own memory, I revel in the intense focus of representational painting.