“The material process of my work has evolved gradually but significantly over the past seven years as I have refined my handmade graphite paint and my methods of painting through continual experimentation. The current body of paintings’ surfaces are slowly built up on canvas with up to thirty carefully made, thin coats of paint, and my compositions are arrived at by means of many small-scale studies on similarly prepared paper. The monochromatic, matte black surfaces are then selectively hand-polished to reveal fields of lustrous, reflective silver tones that emerge from the paint film, creating light from the darkness. In the end, the complexity of my process gives way to a simple pursuit of subtle, quiet beauty.

This pursuit materializes in both formal and conceptual terms, insofar as my compositional focus on balanced asymmetry is analogous to the essential unity of presumed dichotomies. Graphite, a crystalline form of elemental carbon, has the ability to both absorb and reflect light, essentially containing both lightness and darkness. I have a conceptual and poetic interest in this metaphor, namely that a single material can embody both the void and the hope of escaping it.” - M. Benjamin Herndon