From Painting to Portal
For most of my life, painting was where I placed my identity. After twenty years, the work was second nature, shaped by instinct and habit. My style, in truth, was a record of everything I’d chosen not to do. Over time these old patterns stopped feeling alive, but it took three years of deliberate unlearning before I was ready to step away.
In 2020, I made a decision against all advice. I left the gallery representation that legitimized my practice, shut down my studio, and let painting fall silent. I had no idea what would come next. But the decision itself opened something. For three and a half years I entered the world as myself, outside the art world entirely, and what I found there was extraordinary.
Absence changed my attention. Without production to organize around, I started noticing how I moved through everything else—where I lingered, what I left untouched, the shape my days took when nothing demanded filling. What I saw surprised me. I had been organizing my life around an open center, and this was the impulse beneath everything. Painting had actually held me back from seeing it, because the expectation with a canvas is that it gets filled. You’re supposed to resolve the surface, give the viewer something definite to receive.
“But I had always wanted the canvas to be the opening itself. Fill around it. Let the center stay empty, latent, available.”
An inversion that the medium kept obscuring.
This inversion matters because of how decision works.
When we are undecided in our own lives, the world is full of things ready to decide for us. Everything presenting itself with certainty exerts influence. Algorithms, institutions, consensus aesthetics, other people’s confidence. When we haven’t found our own center, definition flows inward. The world shapes us through entrainment.
By clearing the center, by presenting a threshold instead of a conclusion, the work asks something different of the person standing in front of it. You can’t just receive. You have to bring something. You have to decide which opening you enter, and what you’re willing to encounter there. The locus of definition shifts. Instead of the world deciding for you, you decide how you meet the world. The canvas holds space for your volition to become visible.
I see now why I never made bodies of work. I painted little worlds within each canvas, self-contained and singular, and I thought this was an idiosyncrasy of temperament. What I was actually doing was searching for something deeper than painting could hold on its own. A life approach, not a medium.
The three years away clarified the coherence I had been circling. I came back with digital work, sculptural work, hybrid forms that combine material and computational processes. What binds them is the cleared center. The portal structure. I’m ready to move beyond medium specificity and name the continuity at a deeper level, because the continuity was always there. Calling everything portal is accurate. These are containers designed to hold more than one fixed meaning, designed to hold the viewer’s participation as the thing that completes them.
Some of this work belongs in art contexts. Some of it is meant for living with. Objects, environments, systems that operate over time and invite sustained encounter. The aim is transformational, alchemical in the old sense. Something happens when you stand at a threshold you chose to approach. You become more available to what you didn’t already know.
This is where my practice is going.
And it’s where the invitation opens toward you.
If the world has been deciding for you, defining you through entrainment and proximity to certainty, there is another way to move. You find the center you’ve been protecting, even if you didn’t know you were protecting it. You organize around that openness instead of filling it. You practice standing at thresholds and choosing which ones to enter.
“Something will always define. The question is whether it happens to you or through you.”
The work I’m making now is a practice field for the second condition. A place to rehearse what it feels like when volition leads. When the empty center becomes generative. When you stop receiving the world’s resolution and start shaping your own approach.
The next pieces will extend from here. Each one follows this movement toward openness, stays close to what is actually lived, and lets what no longer aligns fall away. The body of work I couldn’t make for twenty years is finally possible, because it had to transcend painting in order to include it.
Leave a comment