Multiplicity: On Holding More Than One Truth

Work in progress, 48×48

Lately I have been thinking about the idea that we do not live as a single, fixed self, but as many selves layered within one life. Not fragmented, not broken—layered. Contradictory at times. Evolving. Contextual. Human.

We are not one thing.

We are the person we were ten years ago and the person we are now. We are calm and anxious, certain and doubtful, generous and afraid. We are shaped by memory, by environment, by love, by loss, by the quiet accumulation of ordinary days. These selves do not replace one another. They coexist. They speak to one another. They argue. They overlap. They take turns leading.

I used to think of growth as becoming a more unified version of myself, as if the goal was to resolve all contradictions into a single clear identity. But I don’t believe that anymore. I think we are meant to be multiple. I think we are meant to hold more than one truth at a time.

This idea has slowly been working its way into my paintings.

In my earlier work, especially the Submerged series, the paintings felt like a single condition—immersion, being underwater, surrounded, held in one atmosphere. But in the work I’m making now, I’m starting to feel something different happening. The paintings are no longer describing one emotional state or one environment. They are holding several at once.

There is air and water. Heat and coolness. Compression and openness. Noise and quiet. Marks that feel like interruption and marks that feel like memory. Some areas feel like impact, others like aftermath. Some parts feel like they are moving quickly, others like they are suspended in time.

It feels closer to how life actually feels.

Not one thing, but many things, all at once.

I’ve been thinking about this in a larger sense too—not just psychologically, but in terms of our place in the world. We are not isolated beings moving through a separate landscape. We are part of a larger system: human, animal, land, weather, time. Everything influencing everything else. Everything in relationship. Everything in conversation.

When I paint now, it feels less like I am trying to make an image and more like I am trying to build a field where these different states can exist together. A place where tension and calm can sit next to each other. Where memory can exist inside the present. Where something can be both breaking and opening at the same time.

I am starting to think that this is what the work is really about.

Not resolution.
Not clarity.
Not a single story.

But multiplicity.
Coexistence.
Circulation.
Emotional weather.

A painting can hold many moments, many sensations, many versions of a self. Maybe that is why we stand in front of certain paintings and feel something we can’t quite explain. Maybe we are recognizing something true about our own internal landscape—something layered and complicated and alive.

I don’t think we are meant to solve ourselves.
I think we are meant to witness ourselves.

And maybe painting, for me, is a way of building a place where all of it is allowed to exist.