Paintings built in layers and scraped back to the weave.

I mix color in batches that would embarrass a smaller painting: a season of ochre in one pail, a blue ground from two pigments and nothing else. The canvases are large because I want them met by the body before the eye. Most are wider than my armspan, and I paint standing, walking the length of the painting rather than reaching across it.

Linen matters because I take paint off as often as I put it on. Cotton bruises when you scrape it; linen holds its weave and gives the blade something to argue with. Each painting is eight or ten layers scraped back to the third, so the finished surface keeps its own history. You can read the early ochre under the final blue the way plaster shows through limewash.

Iris Kanellos (b. 1971, Athens) lives and works between Athens and Rotterdam. Her paintings are held in private collections in Greece, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.