More on Art

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Shortly after I began showing my paintings in 2008, I began writing about my work. From 2010 to 2013 I wrote letters of correspondence to two of my colleagues and friends: Marty McCutcheon and Jan Kather. The letters are now arranged chronologically in A Collection Of Essays On Art, available on michaelchang.dk. Twelve years later, in 2025, I decided to write about my work as a painter again.

A famous maxim attributed to musical comedian Martin Mull reads: 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.' The origins of the quote have never been verified—the maxim is also attributed to the likes of musicians, entertainers, and writers such as William S. Burroughs, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Frank Zappa, George Carlin, Lester Bangs, David Byrne, Steve Martin, Elvis Costello, and Laurie Anderson. – Why take up writing again? What is the purpose of dancing about architecture?

In a post on substack.com, written by a friend of mine, there is a quote that reads, 'Writing is thinking.' To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. My friend on Substack attributes this quote to Paul Graham, a programmer, writer, and investor who holds a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. One reason for me to start writing again would be to get back to thinking – and sharing my thoughts. It is my intention to dance as clearly as I can about my work in these new essays.

On Collecting Souvenirs From the Past and Greek Vases in Museums

Published: Gråbrødretorv, Copenhagen, September 28, 2025

I am a collector by nature, and I like keeping souvenirs from the past. I have to be careful not to gather too many empty glass jars, stones from beaches, or bits of wood that might someday prove useful for building something. Recently (Summer 2025), I redesigned my website, shifting from what a friend once called “a literary feel” to a short, video-clip–based experience. The intention was to create a first-person view, a more intimate connection with past exhibitions. With the exception of my debut, I am fortunate to have video footage spanning from The Man Without Qualities (2010, Danneskiold-Samsøe Gallery) to Graphite (2022, Galleri Weinberger Schandorff).

In 2007, just before the financial crisis, I decided to stop painting figuratively and begin making monochromes. The first videos on my site show footage from 2008 and 2009—me working in two different studios, painting in a reduced, monochromatic manner. I added subtitles to the clips describing this shift from figuration to abstraction. The text begins, a little dramatically: “The most difficult time for me as an artist was December 2007…”

…when I ruined my last figurative painting. Something inside me wanted to destroy what I had just created. Not because I didn't like the painting, but because I liked it too much. I was in love with being talented… and I didn’t like that feeling. So I painted a dark brown colour over that painting. And then I felt a very strong feeling of regret. I cursed myself. I really, cursed myself for destroying that painting. I thought, 'I’d quit painting, never paint again.' For three days… I quit being a painter. I remember this strange feeling of regret. What was going on? Why did I destroy the best painting I'd ever made? What on earth made me do that? Then it began to make sense. Imagine how liberating it is to work as an artist and NOT care about being talented. I began to paint monochromatic paintings. I used my body as a scale and my proportions as measurements for all my paintings and drawings. I made up rules, and I used numbers as guidelines. I became a “dogme” painter… and, in a way, an abstract painter.

The art world has never been stable. Shifts and upheavals are the norm. As an artist, I never know if, where, or when I will be able to exhibit again. When I had my first solo show in 2010, I naively thought: “I’ve made it!” A few shows later, I understood the importance of patience and documentation. In 2025, there is upheaval once again: veteran galleries are closing, while new platforms such as Artsy.net bring art online.

Veteran gallerist Tim Blum announces closure of his physical spaces.

”In an interview with ArtNews, Blum said the decision was less about the current art market and more “about the system.” Blum described the gallery’s participation at Art Basel last month as a “thunderclap—confirmation of everything I’ve been feeling for years,” referring to a growing dissatisfaction with the expanding infrastructure of contemporary gallery life, including constant art fairs, openings, and administrative obligations.” — Artsy.net

I am now in my early fifties. My walking shoes are well worn, and my pace has slowed from sprinting, to jogging, to simply taking my time. What matters is to keep working, whatever the upheaval. In my experience, most obstacles originate in thought: ideas about talent, about success. I had to learn that ambition should be directed inward, as motivation. Ambition about the work itself—not the response to it. Mental gymnastics are necessary to overcome hardship and resistance. Since my debut in 2008, I’ve shifted my goal: from overturning the art world to simply creating something meaningful for the small audience my work touches. Success, I’ve learned, can be measured within the studio.

Artistically, the decisive change in 2007 was to stop painting figures and begin asking: How can rules and restrictions act as catalysts for new ideas, new ways of seeing, new ways of working? By refusing to make recognisable images, I had to turn my attention to other aspects of painting. The tactile quality of paint became my foothold in this new territory, leading to years of experimentation with materials. Chalk remains a favourite. So do beeswax and graphite. Every pigment has its own personality. Colours behave like children at play, restless in the light. Two colours act as lovers; add a third and you have a family. Add more, and you are building a family tree. Before long, you are writing novels with these characters—novels about relationships across generations, like the best of stories.

In painting monochromes, I realised how essential layers are. Each layer holds a moment in time. Looking at the strata in a painting feels like time travel—akin to stargazing, where the light we see has travelled for years before reaching us. By 2025, layering has become my way of working. I imitate historians and conservators: wall restorers in museums leave behind tiny squares of paint layers, a discreet record of colour histories. Tree rings mark decades of growth and pause. In my studio, I alternate between reading about painting techniques and conducting trial-and-error experiments. I use eggs in my work—egg white as a glue, yolk as an emulsifier binding oil and water into paint. The technique aims at both a pleasing result and stability.

I will never know if I succeed. The true scale for durability is the Greek vases in museums, thousands of years old. I wish I could watch my oil paint grow brittle, see colours gradually become more transparent. But in the end, none of that matters as much as the fervour—the drive to keep making.

How To Watch Paint Dry

Published: Gråbrødretorv, Copenhagen, June 19, 2026

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” — Paul Graham. The same can be said about painting. Painting is thinking. To paint well is to think clearly.

Learning the craft of painting allows you to avoid common problems such as cracking, sagging canvas, rot, crumbling, and delamination. But painting well can be difficult for reasons that have little to do with craft.

This essay explores the coherence between the concerns that occupy me as a painter and the thinking that unfolds in my sketchbooks.

Crayons and paper

I grew up in a home filled with crayons and paper. My mother is a trained technical draughtsperson, and from an early age I was encouraged to draw.

Watching my own children write stories and make illustrations together allowed me to observe how they influenced one another as they developed a visual language.

When my oldest daughter was a teenager, she was influenced by Japanese cartoons. But as she gradually developed a style of her own, only loosely based on Manga, she was criticised by her peers.

It makes you wonder whether there are conventions in children’s drawings. A sun in the corner? Stick figures? Short arms and oversized heads? Mermaids? A lack of perspective? Sparse detail? Colouring outside the outlines?

Applied to children’s drawings, conventions of style seem strangely limiting. Would you correct a child for placing the sun in the centre of the lower half of the picture plane? Or would you find it intriguing and ask why?

As a parent, I would prefer children’s drawings to remain limitless and free from convention. When I compare my children’s early intuitive mark-making with their later learned forms of expression, style is simply not the whole picture. There are no right or wrong children’s drawings; only different stages of development and different choices being made.

Likewise, recognisable styles make artworks easier to categorise and discuss. But reducing images to questions of right and wrong is a limited way of understanding what they do.

In the documentary My Kid Could Paint That, there is a scene in which four-year-old Marla paints on a large canvas. Her father has stretched the canvas, decided its scale, and provided his daughter with paint and brushes. The scene suggests that artistic meaning emerges from choices made before the first mark appears.

The function of style is to shape perception. Instead of asking whether Marla is an artist, we should ask how she is an artist. Because she is guided by her father’s knowledge of painting and art history, that too is part of how Marla becomes an artist.

Rather than simply transmitting information, images engage our imagination. They construct a reality not only through visual means but also through intention.

The meaning of an artwork is inseparable from its material embodiment. We use our bodies to sense the world around us. A painting speaks through colour, form, and brushwork, and also through whether we perceive it as large or small, tall or wide, dry or glossy, old or newly made, sharp or rounded. Our understanding of form, shape, and material is rooted in the way we experience our own bodies.

Technical and formal questions are central to my own artistic practice. Yet formal constraints are more than decorative devices. They generate meaning beyond structure, composition, and repetition. They give rise to questions that are not immediately present on the surface.

What makes a painting modern if its style is contemporary while its rectangular format and painting techniques are ancient? And more curiously, how are form and meaning connected?

Art as a career?

When I watch the documentary about the four-year-old artist, I cannot help adding meaning to her story.

Did she paint all the works herself? Beyond stretching the canvas, how much did her father contribute? How much of the process is collaboration? Is it a shared production? What were the motives? Who benefits from the attention? Who pays for the art? What role does the gallerist play? How much influence does Marla have over which paintings are exhibited?

It is reasonable to look for answers in the conditions under which art is produced. It is equally natural to look beyond the artist alone in order to engage with the work. Evaluation becomes a social event. Categorising artworks and passing judgement on style can be understood as ways of distributing authorship; not over the making of the artwork, but over the meanings we attach to it.

As such, the relationship between form and meaning remains open-ended. Even when artists collaborate in making a work, they have little control over what it will come to mean for its audience.

Curators, art foundations, gallerists, art historians, colleagues, museums, collectors, patrons, and the general public all contribute their own interpretations. So, what does it mean to pursue art as a career?

Models of authorship

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a cautionary tale about choosing art as a profession. The story of Arachne and Athena illustrates how authority is negotiated during a contest between a talented artist and the goddess of wisdom, warfare, and handicraft. As an artist, you are always up against dominant narratives in a struggle over authorship. External forces continually seek to define what your work means and, like Arachne, risk reducing you to a spider endlessly spinning its web.

In my own experience, artistic thought develops through a web of support and dialogue rather than through individual brilliance, let alone the myth of the solitary (usually male) genius. Rather than gods awakening our senses, animating our bodies, or transforming us into spiders, it is often family members who encourage us to draw; siblings who shape our sense of taste; correspondence with friends and colleagues that informs our understanding of a work.

All these collaborators challenge hierarchical models of authorship by participating in the making of meaning. Artistic thought is shared. It develops through dialogue, collaboration, and role models.

It is difficult to think of anything that enters the world alone. History holds its sway over the present and, no matter how hard we try, we never gain complete autonomy over our work.

Nicolas Poussin’s Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658) suggests that we do not make our journey alone. Orion has been blinded by Oenopion, the legendary king of Chios. In Poussin’s painting there is a tiny but significant detail: the servant Cedalion stands upon Orion’s shoulders, helping the giant hunter find his way.

When we look at paintings, we do not look with our eyes alone. We look with everything we have experienced, and with everything that came before the particular painting before us.

Can visual language be separated from cultural upbringing? Are paintings autonomous objects, or are they shaped by the identity of their maker? Is it possible to look at my work and ignore my Korean and Danish heritage? How does biography provide a foundation for what we see?

There is something reassuring in the fact that we cannot escape what came before us.

Every generation wants to enter the world with an open mind and make experiences for itself. In 2011 I copied, reproduced, deconstructed, reconstructed, dissolved, wrote upon, and almost eliminated images by Paul Cézanne, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, and Francisco Goya. It was by no means an expression of aversion.

One of the paintings I appropriated was the painting Puberty by Edvard Munch. Rather than fleeing from the awkward uncertainty of not yet knowing, there is value in the process of becoming. Almost eliminating, dissolving, deconstructing, and reconstructing a visual language can itself become a powerful way of learning.

Reading visual languages

If there is coherence between my essays and my sketchbooks, it is rooted in language.

My essays and my sketches have developed simultaneously, side by side, over decades. Together they demonstrate both structure and its gradual transformation.

The function of letters is to form words that carry meaning through their relationships to one another. Likewise, a grammar for sketching is valuable because it generates an infinite number of possibilities for further exploration.

Paradoxically, in order to sketch freely I first had to establish a grammar for my visual language. It is built upon rules of limitation, constraint, repetition, grids, rectangles, systems, and sequences of numbers.

Viewed individually, the sketches in my sketchbooks resemble disjointed syllables. Seen together, they begin to reveal their underlying grammar.

Curiously, Korean is also a syllabic language, with vowels and consonants arranged into square blocks. As a child I could not read written Korean. The characters were visual riddles that I could not solve. Perhaps that intensified both my curiosity about Korea’s place in my identity and my fascination with written visual language.

The grammar I developed for my own visual language also accommodates deviations, accidents, revisions, and uncertainty. In this respect it resembles writing essays, which are short literary investigations of a subject. Grammar establishes structure. Structure makes a progressive development possible.

Individually, sketches resemble syllables waiting to be assembled into meaning. Together they form a visual syntax. Likewise, my essays repeatedly ask questions that unsettle the structures my sketches establish. Grids establish form, while the essays ask how form relates to meaning. The sketches belong to particular moments in my life, while the essays question whether biography can ever explain an artwork. The paintings emerge from systems, yet their meanings remain open to interpretation.

Do we attempt to read images in the same way that we read letters? How do visual grammars develop? What happens when the title of a work changes? Does the meaning change even when the image remains the same? Why does abstraction communicate differently from figuration? What relationships exist between all the seemingly insignificant parts?

Together, the essays and the sketchbooks become investigations into the structures through which meaning is generated. Writing is thinking. Painting is thinking. The clearer we think, the more questions emerge. Perhaps that is why it is so hard to do well.

How To Look At A Yellow Painting

Published: Gråbrødretorv, Copenhagen, July 21, 2026

It’s easy to dismiss something we do not immediately recognise. One way to respond is with humour. Whenever I come across a comic about abstract art, I smile. I often send these cartoons to the owner of the gallery that represents my work. I do not actually know whether Mathias Schandorff enjoys them as much as I do, because we have never spoken about them. In a way, that makes them even funnier to me. What if he thinks I am offended by them? Or even angered? I find that possibility strangely amusing.

What I like about these cartoons is that they often reveal how something can be seen from a different vantage point. In them, I catch a glimpse of how I might easily be perceived by someone who has yet to enter the world of abstract painting. When I finish a monochromatic painting, I send it to Gallery Weinberger Schandorff. They publish it on their website as a ”New Arrival”, include it in their mailing list, and post it on Artsy. I cannot help but wonder how alien all of this must appear.

When I began making monochromatic paintings in December 2007, my mother literally asked me whether it was some kind of joke. I told her it was not, and that this was how I intended to paint from then on. Because she's my mother, I could tell that she worried about how I would be perceived – as silly perhaps. She also feared that I would face a great deal of resistance from whoever I showed my new work to. In a way, she realised that we often dismiss not only what we do not recognise, but also the ideas behind it.

How can a yellow painting communicate anything? What is the message, the purpose, the content of a painting that consists of an almost entirely yellow surface? What is the meaning of abstract painting, really?

I understand why a nearly all-yellow painting might seem like a joke to most people, even to those who enjoy looking at art. But my mother's reaction was also reassuring, because it was genuine and entirely her own. It reflect who she is and her relationship with the world around her. Those are precisely the kinds of reactions I value when looking at a painting. There is real value in learning something new.

Studying Foreign Languages

Having a Danish mother and a Korean father, I grew up watching my parents communicate in a curious mixture of Danish and English. Apart from a few phrases, they never spoke Korean. My mother never learned much Korean, and that made me aware of just how different Danish and Korean are. Not only in the way the two languages look and sound, but also in the two cultures they express.

As a child, I remember studying foreign languages such as English, French, and German at school. Learning a new language required both time and effort. At first, many of the words sounded funny. But gradually they stopped being funny and began to make sense. The purpose of learning a second language, whatever that language may be, is essentially the same: to understand and to be understood by anyone who has learned the rules of that particular language.

As a citizen of a small country like Denmark, I have always appreciated being able to study art in a foreign language and to read books on art in English. If I had continued laughing at the funny-sounding English words instead of taking the time to learn the language, I would have limited my ability to engage with the world beyond Denmark, and, perhaps as a consequence, with the world of abstract painting as well.

How to Communicate with Heptapods

Learning something new is difficult. And if the reward is not immediately apparent, we are often tempted to give up. So what would be the point of learning how to look at an abstract painting?

In the film Arrival, the written language of the heptapods is not simply a collection of symbols with dictionary meanings. Each circular logogram is generated according to a set of rules, and as the linguist Louise Banks gradually understands those rules, her way of thinking begins to change. She does not simply learn what individual signs mean; she becomes fluent in the language as a system.

I am not suggesting that studying abstract painting will lead to dramatic Hollywood endings. But imagine understanding how an abstract painting was made and why it was made. Like learning to communicate with the heptapods through their circular ink-blot language, learning to look at abstract painting is itself something that can be learned. The reward is that something once alien can gradually become strangely familiar and even meaningful.

Scribbles, Drips, and Circles

Imagine walking into the studio in the morning to paint a masterpiece on a huge blank canvas. You are not a heptapod but an artist, and it is your task to add paint to that empty surface. Somehow you are expected to create something that changes the way people see themselves, contributes to thousands of years of art history, and perhaps even saves the world.

In 2007, when I stopped making figurative paintings, I was looking for a way of working without thinking about artistic goals. I began introducing rules and restrictions into my practice as practical tools. I did not save the world, but I did keep adding paint to canvases. In a strange way, having a structure made perfect sense to me.

The first rule was simple: use only one colour in a painting. It helped me focus on the act of painting itself and, more importantly, it kept me painting. But new questions quickly emerged. If two monochromatic paintings are hung side by side, are they one work or two? The moment I placed two paintings next to one another, I had divided the picture plane. That became the beginning of my interest in grids.

It is surprisingly difficult not to make something recognisable. Human beings are extraordinarily imaginative. We are constantly trying to find patterns and familiar forms. In 1866, the German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum introduced the term Pareidolie, later translated into English as pareidolia, to describe our tendency to perceive meaningful forms where none were intentionally created.

Meaning does not emerge because what you are looking at depicts or symbolises something. Rather, abstract paintings become intelligible because they participate in a shared visual grammar. The foundation of that grammar is surprisingly simple: what you are looking at is not a recognisable figure. From there, grammar provides structure, structure provides meaning, and meaning provides a foothold for working abstractly. When I look at abstract painting, I imagine viewing it through a particular set of lenses, where monochromes, scribbles, grids, drips, circles, triangles, and squares within squares all become meaningful, not because they are masterpieces, although many of them are, but because they possess structure.

Repetitions, Variations, Exceptions, And Transformations

Grids are perhaps the simplest expression of repetition. They appear throughout the history of visual culture, from ancient Egyptian scrolls and mandalas to the pixel grids that make up the images on our computer screens. Grids are also an invaluable tool for drawing. Each line establishes the conditions for the next, and before long an endless variety of intersections and spaces begins to emerge, often without conscious planning.

When I first began working with grids, I wrote (in 2011) that I had discovered a way of making paintings that was independent of communicating a specific message, yet still deeply meaningful to me. Looking back now, I see that grids have become one of the grammatical structures that underpin my work.

A painting can be seen as a picture plane that may be divided into a grid, suggesting where any mark might be placed. At the same time, it can be understood as a single unit within a larger grid that continues beyond the edges of the painting. Looking at a painting through the lens of the grid shifts our attention towards its dimensions, its internal structure, and the way it occupies the surrounding space.

One way we learn a new language is by studying how words and sentences work together. We notice repetitions, variations, exceptions, and transformations. Gradually we begin to understand the grammar of the language. The same can be true of abstract painting. Here, too, we encounter repetition, variation, exception, and transformation. Using a method such as a grid is not only practical. Because it is part of a system, it opens up situations in which sustained looking produces observations. We might ask: Why does this variation occur here? How does the material itself contribute to the logic? What changes across a series of grids? The questions that arise from the work become part of the work itself, rather than merely a response to it. That, perhaps, is the purpose of having a system.

The idea of describing my own work in terms of grammar has emerged slowly over decades. So slowly, in fact, that it feels as though I have gradually flipped the script on meaning, images, and visual language. My aim was never to make paintings function like letters in an alphabet or to treat a painting as a visual "utterance". Grammar simply became a practical tool. It helped me hold things together and, perhaps most importantly, gave me a way to begin.

One of the cartoons I have sent to Mathias depicts a painter standing in front of a large white canvas. The painter is wonderfully dishevelled, with uncombed hair, strange slippers, and paint splattered across his clothes. Its caption reads, ”Så får I ikke mere for den 25-øre,” which roughly translates as, ”That's all, folks”, the catchphrase on the banner shown at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons. I recognise a little of myself in this cartoon. Not because it illustrates abstract painting, but because it invites us to look beyond the painter. In this way, the cartoon perhaps unintentionally suggests that looking at abstract paintings is a strangely private affair.

Notes On A Work Consisting Of Two Panels

Published: Gråbrødretorv, Copenhagen, July 22, 2026

Each panel was worked on separately. Both share the same method of preparation, using layers of egg white and chalk.

The first layer of paint is egg tempera. It is applied with a brush until the entire surface is covered. The panel is then left to dry for seven weeks.

The second layer consists of handmade oil paint made from linseed oil and pigment. It is applied with a small spatula.

When I apply the second layer, I pay attention to the marks left by the spatula and nothing else. My aim is to distribute the paint as evenly as possible so that it dries evenly. I want the surface to appear homogeneous, without shiny or dry areas. This is surprisingly difficult to achieve and therefore requires constant attention.

I watch for small shapes that appear by chance as the paint is spread across the surface. The rough edges around the painted area are especially appealing to me. They remind me of the deckled edges of the handmade paper I use in printmaking. They also introduce a small element of drama into the act of painting, because the movement of the hand changes completely when it reaches the edge of the painting or a corner. A hand moving around an edge behaves differently from one moving across the middle of the painting.

Because I work in layers, tiny "islands" of the previous layer emerge through the new wet paint. A negotiation begins between covering an island and keeping it. Some islands are covered deliberately, others by accident, and some survive.

I try to avoid the appearance of anything recognisable like a sign, a face, a horse, Italy. The moment a shape becomes recognisable, I remove it. I continue working until I feel there is nothing more to add, until I can no longer find symbols in the surface, and until the painting appears to relax into itself.

Rather than expressing anything, I attempt to remove traces of intention from the surface. I don't want to find myself in the work. The painting is not invented. It is uncovered. Whether that is possible, I do not know. But it is how I want the experience of painting to feel. I want the painting to look as though it had always existed, and I simply happened to discover it. The painting is then left to dry for another seven weeks.

The third layer repeats the same procedure. It offers another opportunity to create new islands or cover those that survived the previous layer. This introduces a new challenge. I do not want the islands to acquire double edges of colour. One solution is to make an island slightly smaller so that the new paint covers its previous outline. But this inevitably changes its shape, and with every altered shape the entire surface must be reconsidered.

Each new layer added to the surface becomes a variation of the same painting rather than a step towards a predetermined image. I rarely think about where the painting will end up or what it will look like. Eventually, the work becomes what it becomes.

There is a system behind the dimensions of the paintings based on the proportions of my body and the Fibonacci sequence. When exhibited together, these proportions become part of the experience, introducing a spatial quality to the work without requiring conscious compositional decisions on the surface.

Over time, however, I have come to think of this system less as an aesthetic decision than as a practical one. It removes the need to reinvent the proportions of every new painting or drawing.

The lower panel of this particular work has a final layer made from linseed oil and beeswax. I added this layer to depart from my method.

I enjoy looking at paintings that do not feel like the execution of a preconceived design, much as I enjoy looking at a tree or a rock in nature. Or looking at walls stripped of wallpaper. What the painting means, I do not know. What does a tree or a rock mean? What does a wall stripped of wallpaper mean? I search for ways of making paintings that I can keep looking at without ever quite knowing what I will see.

Notes On A Work On Paper

Published: Gråbrødretorv, Copenhagen, July 23, 2026

The materials used in this work are graphite, gouache and watercolour. The sketch is made in a single session. There is no preparation other than tearing a sheet from a 100 × 70 cm sheet of 300 gsm printmaking paper. The thickness of the paper is well suited to making sketches like this. The fibres are open enough to absorb watercolour, the paper is thick enough not to buckle excessively during painting.

I like my works to have a clear top and bottom. I begin by drawing a thin line, four centimetres from the edge of the paper, leaving an additional two to three centimetres at the bottom. I divide the picture plane at approximately one-third to two-thirds with a single vertical graphite line. I then draw a horizontal line using the same proportion. These two lines generate four fields within the defined space.

I continue by drawing two vertical lines, each dividing one of the four fields at approximately one-third to two-thirds. Next come three horizontal lines, each placed within three of the remaining fields according to the same principle. Then five vertical lines, eight horizontal lines, and finally thirteen vertical lines, each time selecting one of the remaining fields and dividing it using the same proportional relationship.

I add six diagonal lines spaced evenly across the picture plane. I do not carry these lines through uninterrupted. Instead, I shift them so that every second field contains part of a diagonal line. At this point I have stopped following the Fibonacci sequence directly, but the sequence continues to guide subsequent marks because of the strong geometric structure it establishes.

This concludes the first stage of the sketch.

II

I then select a colour and a brush and begin adding colour to the empty fields. I begin by adding lines in every second empty field. The lines continue to follow the one-third to two-thirds proportions established earlier. I paint an odd number of parallel lines, leaving approximately the width of one brushstroke between them.

I continue working with one colour at a time. Gradually I let go of the underlying structure and rely more on intuition and prior experience. I draw lines across the fields, follow existing lines from one field into another, vary the pressure on the brush so the paint produces irregular edges, switch to a broader brush, paint over existing lines, and redraw them.

Whenever I feel the sketch begin to drift away from me, I add marks that reinforce its underlying geometry. Conversely, if the sketch begins to appear too rigid, I abandon the structure, add more water, and allow the paint to find its own course. Sometimes I load one area heavily with paint, lift the paper, and allow gravity to pull the paint downward, temporarily surrendering part of my control over the image.

III

This sketch is one in a larger series, all made according to the same principles. Interestingly, the sketches rarely resemble one another. In fact, it is surprisingly difficult to produce two sketches that look alike using this method. At the same time, they are clearly connected through their structure, materials, colours, dimensions and method of construction.

Eventually I reach a point where I can’t add another mark. The brush hovers above the paper, searching for a place to land. This pause causes me to reconsider the entire sketch. That is when I stop. I sign the work, stamp it, and leave it to dry. It usually dries within a day.

IV

When I return to it, the sketch often appears different from the moment I stopped working on it. I rarely know where a sketch is heading while I am making it. The experience carries over into another sketch, a print or a painting. The way I approach edges, small islands of colour, relationships between colours, dimensions, and the joining of two panels all originate in experience. The experience travels freely from one medium to another, but I never try to replicate a sketch as a painting.

Everything about painting is different from sketching: the medium, the materials, the scale, the drying time, the tools I use, and the time it takes to make a painting. When I paint, I want the process to feel light and enjoyable. I focus on the experience of applying the paint itself. Everything else rests on practice.

On Myth, Style And Younger Selves

Published: Gråbrødretorv, Copenhagen, July 27, 2026

In 2007, the process of depicting recognisable objects had become repetitive. Looking at figures on my walls stopped being enjoyable. I wanted to live with paintings that evoked a different set of emotions.

The difficult part of switching from figuration to abstraction was realising that I had to abandon figurative painting in order to gain access to another way of working. I was searching for a way to keep painting while making it more enjoyable to live with the consequences. When you paint non-figuratively, you work against your own imagination as much as anyone else's. That is a different kind of challenge. The work itself and writing about the methods behind it feel meaningful to me today. Each painting gives rise to new questions. I am not sure I would have felt the same had I remained a figurative painter.

The decisions I make while working are intuitive, but intuition is built on experience. When my children were young, I learned to play the guitar so I could sing to them at bedtime. When you play the guitar, moving from a C chord to a D chord is no longer a conscious decision. You don't think about where your fingers belong. You know the song. Your attention can shift to the feeling in your voice.

Painting is similar for me. I know how to paint because I have done it many times. I trust the foundation I have built. I no longer think about how to hold the spatula or apply the paint. I can focus on the gesture, the mark, the thickness of the paint, and, most importantly, on what it feels like to make it.

Playing music can transport you into a particular state of mind. I want painting to do the same. Because painting is a physical medium, something remains afterwards. The painting becomes a recording that can be experienced again and by others. Looking at a painting is of course different from making it, just as listening to a recording is different from performing a song live. I don't really want to be too aware of what I am doing. I want to experience the process, and that requires knowing how to paint, but not where the painting will take me.

During writing essays about my work I have become sceptical of the myth of the solitary artistic genius. It certainly doesn't feel inviting. I am not sure what purpose it serves. The myth of genius creates unnecessary distance. Personally, I prefer encountering a work before I encounter the mythology surrounding the artist. If I approach a painting believing it was made by a genius, I risk comparing myself to the artist rather than paying attention to the painting itself. As a painter, I am interested in experiencing a painting first and learning about the artist's biography second. I am not suggesting that everyone should become an artist, but I do believe that looking at art should be open to everyone.

Style can create a similar distance. It is useful for cataloguing works of art, but much less useful for experiencing them. Imagine walking through a museum categorising everything you see.
Abstract Expressionism.
Colour Field painting.
Concrete art.
Op Art.
Minimalism.
That exercise can almost be done from the doorway, before stepping into the gallery.
I would rather encourage people to trust their senses. To experience paintings at a human scale. To notice what happens when they stand in front of them, move around them, and allow themselves time to observe.

I believe that painting can be learned. I am one example of that. I wasn't born with the ability to paint, and I don't think I possess gifts that are fundamentally different from those of other people. If I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be a practical one: read a handbook on painting before picking up a brush. I wasted years discovering things that generations of painters had already learned and generously written down. Painting is a craft, and there is no shame in learning it from those who came before you.

I would also tell myself to start small. Art materials are expensive, and working too large before understanding the medium is often counterproductive. Most importantly, I would tell my younger self to find ways to keep going. Painting takes time. Learning how to make time an ally rather than an obstacle is one of the greatest skills a painter can acquire. If I had believed in the myth of the solitary artistic genius, I would have had no advice to give my younger self. The idea of genius suggests that nothing can be taught.