Hermit as Interface
Every so often I disappear for two weeks, sometimes a month, because I paint. I step into a different register of attention, one where perception stops skimming and starts opening. That register crystallizes into the surface. The finished paintings carry a spaciousness I rarely encounter elsewhere, and people who live with mine have named it without being prompted. They describe a steadier air in the room, a sense of space returning, and hearing that keeps me willing to enter the threshold again and again.
The entry still asks something of me. In the first days my attention reaches for its usual handles, my mind tries to keep me in circulation, and some part of me worries about what my silence will be made to mean. I accept the friction because I know the outcome, and because the outcome is concrete. The paintings return with more clearance around them, and that clearance keeps working long after the studio period ends.
“I step into a different register of attention, where perception stops skimming and starts opening.”
I have been training this for most of my life. In my twenties the disappearances were clumsy and urgent. Over time I learned the difference between hiding and going in, and the threshold became less a dramatic choice than a method. It functions like an extended field trip taken inside the same life, where everything is turned down long enough for perception to regain its natural sharpness.
Accessibility is treated as a virtue almost everywhere. A decent person replies. A serious person stays reachable. When I step out of that current, social pressure gathers at the edges, and guilt tries to translate that pressure into a story. People wonder if I am angry, fragile, or staging distance. Even friends who love me sometimes treat silence as a problem that wants a quick solution.
What they do not see is how literal my sensitivity is. Stimulation stacks in my body like static. I can keep functioning while it accumulates, yet the inner field becomes grainy. Subtle distinctions flatten. Composition starts taking cues from whatever is most insistent, even when the insistence is coming from inside my own mind.
So I leave the room.
The phrase “hermit” can sound romantic from the outside. From the inside, it is mostly logistics and restraint. Fewer conversations. Fewer images. Fewer small requests that seem harmless one by one and become heavy in aggregate. I stop taking in other people’s cadence so my own rhythm can return. The mind bargains anyway. It offers productivity fantasies, rehearses social anxieties, reaches for little loops that make the day feel populated. I let that happen, and I keep the conditions simple.
This is why I think of it as an interface. An interface translates between systems. Solitude is the surface that translates between ordinary life, with its constant micro-demands, and the kind of attention that can hold a painting open without rushing to close it.
“Attention stops behaving like a beam and starts behaving like a field.”
Then something shifts, and it shifts reliably. Attention stops behaving like a beam and starts behaving like a field, and perception moves into a different register, a different octave. Space appears in the in-between. I begin to see through, rather than only at. That is where composition starts telling the truth.
This is the condition I paint from.
I notice how much painting right now is built to click quickly. A clever symbol. A compressed story. A premise that lands immediately. I understand the appeal of that economy, and I don’t think it is immoral. I just know what it does to my own attention. The quicker the click, the sooner the looking ends, and the surface becomes a delivery vehicle rather than a place.
“I want the painting to remain usable across years, across whole seasons of a life, sometimes across lifetimes, as it moves from one person to another.”
I work slowly because I am trying to make surfaces that keep looking back. Obvious narrative cues get reduced, because I want the painting to remain usable across years, across whole seasons of a life, sometimes across lifetimes as it moves from one person to another. I want it to hold a threshold without requiring anyone to perform a threshold-crossing in public.
Disappearing has a cost. It means delayed replies, missed gatherings, the stiffness of re-entry. It means trusting that the people who belong in my life will read my absence as weather rather than as accusation. When I return, the world can feel loud. The first café can feel like a stadium, and conversation can feel percussive. I re-enter slowly, and I try not to punish the world for being what it is.
“Counterspace holds the composition the way a room holds a gathering.”
Over time, the studio has taught me something simple. The quiet area, the empty-looking field, the margin that appears to be doing nothing, ends up doing most of the structural work. In my paintings, counterspace holds the composition the way a room holds a gathering. The edge becomes active. The emptiness becomes load-bearing.
If you live with one of these paintings, you already know what I mean, even if you have never used my language for it. The work does not ask you to disappear for a month. It sits inside your ordinary life and keeps the threshold available, the same cleared register I train for, held quietly on the wall. Over time, if you pass it often enough, it can return a little more space to the room, and a little more space to you.
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