From Painting to Portal
For most of my life, painting was the object and act I was identified with. Twenty years of it. The material lived in my body, and what people called my style was really the shape of accumulated refusals—all the things I’d learned not to do because they didn’t work, didn’t sell, didn’t fit the story people told about my work.
Around 2017 I started taking it apart. Three years of deliberate unlearning while still showing work, still performing the version of myself the market recognized. By 2020 I had dismantled so much that I couldn’t paint the way I used to. I left my gallery, packed up my studio, and didn’t touch a brush for three and a half years.
That period was its own education. Lose the thing that made you recognizable to yourself and you discover what remains without it. For me it was a quality of attention that had little to do with paint, a willingness to stay with material and let go of outcomes. I read differently. I looked at other people’s work differently. I noticed what I was drawn to when there was no pressure to make anything of it. Something quieter recalibrated.
“The hardest part was holding together while everything that had defined me dissolved.”
Breaking the crystallization without losing continuity, without floating away or getting lost in the dark.
When I picked up the brush again in 2023, the twenty years were still there, but as depth rather than weight. I could use what I knew without being used by it. The work carried the stillness I’d found during the years away, and style had become instrumental, a way of conveying something rather than the thing being conveyed.
I still paint. But I’ve started calling everything I make portals, because painting is only one telescope onto the zone I’m actually working in. Each medium offers a specific angle on something vast, and I want more angles now. Intimate pieces, distilled and iconic, that can travel with you without being a burden, but when they arrive they’re whole. Digital work. Frames, materiality, built objects that function as thresholds in their own right.
What I’m offering is an encapsulation of what I went through. A structure of attention you can return to over time and find it still giving. A counter-space that holds open the moment before habit reasserts itself, before the world locks you back into the shape it expects.
“It’s the break of blue through cloud cover, the eternal framed by everything passing in front of it.”
A reminder that there’s somewhere to return to. Having dismantled everything and arrived somewhere better, I know this to be true. Every piece I make now comes from that knowing.
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