Faith McClure interviews painter Julie Mehretu about her work.

Mehretu remarks: "I’m constantly playing with these various sides of making, one where you’re trying to make sense of what you’re doing and understand with some kind of rational perspective what’s happening in the work, the intention, who am I in the work, why am I interested in this and what’s really informing this — you ask these questions and you try to use rational means to make sense of that. Then there’s the process where in order to generate and make work in the way that I’ve always made work, I really follow a much more intuitive form of knowledge-making and trust in the process . . . to be able to make and get my head out of the way. Then usually after that process, I go back and try and make sense of what I’m doing, what’s interesting, what’s happening, what’s going on with my hand. So there’s this conversation that keeps going back and forth. I think what you said about Guston calling it a third hand is interesting. I think about it almost like this third space, a new space, some other new form that is emergent in the process of making but also in the process of looking and interacting with the painting. So, if you actually spend time and look at painting as a kind of time-based experience, a time-based media, then you can really participate with it . . . where this emergent space exists."