ARTIST STATEMENT

The Mische technique is not how I paint. It is how I think.

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I think in layers. A lesson learned is a layer. An experience lived is a layer. A finished painting is a layer. The technique taught me that meaning doesn't arrive all at once — it accumulates, slowly, one transparency over another, until something luminous emerges that couldn't have existed any other way.

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I work in an indirect painting process rooted in the Renaissance, built in layers. The final step is the one I live for: white and three primaries, applied in successive glazes, producing a luminous optical gray that contains every color at once. That luminosity, that optical impossibility, is what the entire process is building toward. I am never not giddy when it arrives.

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The images come from my life. Motherhood, womanhood, the funny things and the frightening ones and the ones that make me furious. Some paintings say love you. Some say something considerably less tender. The subject matter shifts, realistic, surreal, somewhere in the uncharted territory between, but the technique remains constant. It is the through line. The thing I trust when nothing else is certain.

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I paint for myself. A painting is finished when it's empty, when everything that needed to come out has come out. Then I live with it. And it speaks back. Sometimes something deep. Sometimes something about the technique. Even a painting that didn't quite work has something to return to me. That conversation is the whole point.