Balancing on the Edge

quality of light…symmetry…a moment in time

No one comes through life without scars.

We'd all prefer to skip the parts that leave a mark. But the scars are the signs of life — evidence that you were in it, that things mattered, that you kept going anyway. Mine have made me, if not perfect — and here I smile — then at least undeniably alive.

For most of my adult life I held down three, sometimes four jobs at once. Sales. Property management. Design clients. And painting — always painting — somewhere in the margins, after everything else was handled. Los Angeles doesn't let you be precious about your time. You carry what you need to carry, you keep the plates spinning, and you tell yourself that one day the space will open up.

Last October, it did. Not tidily. Not entirely on my terms. But it did.

I won't pretend the adjustment has been simple. When you've lived on a treadmill for decades, stepping off is disorienting in ways you don't expect. You keep waiting for the interruption. You feel faintly guilty for the quiet. You wonder if you're doing enough, being enough, moving fast enough — even when there's nowhere you urgently need to be.

That voice doesn't disappear when the jobs do. That's the real renegotiation.

There's another treadmill, less visible but just as relentless. Western thinking has a word for a good day: productive. Crank it out. Show the work. Fill the hours with measurable output. I feel that voice. I suspect most of us do.

But if I chase productivity in the studio, I become an art machine. I can make things people like. Pleasing things. Competent things. Things that sell. What I can't make, on the productivity treadmill, is work that has anything real of me in it. Not the small me who shows up and performs. The larger Me — the one who feels the light shift at 4pm and knows it means something, who sits with a canvas until it starts to speak back — she needs a different kind of time. Unscheduled time. Undefended time. Time that doesn't justify itself.

And if I'm honest, some days the busyness is still easier than the stillness. Because stillness asks something the treadmill never did: to sit with yourself long enough to feel something true, and then be brave enough to pull it out and put it on the canvas. I am still learning this. Some mornings I catch myself running — filling the hours with the familiar — when what the work actually needs is for me to slow down and feel something.

That's the real adjustment. And it's harder than any job I've ever held.

What it looks like in practice is quieter than I expected. Walking to the farmers market for tonight's dinner instead of planning a week's worth of meals in advance. A slower morning. A longer look at the light. Small choices made one at a time instead of everything managed and accounted for in advance.

A life made from choices, not from trying to get everything in and done.

I'm still finding my footing. Some days I'm in the studio early and everything flows. Others I sit with a sketchbook and nothing comes — and that, I'm learning, is also the work. The contemplating, the noticing, the writing, the staying curious — these aren't the things I do instead of painting. They're the things that make the painting possible.

Balancing on the edge between solid ground and open air.

That's exactly where I am. One foot still knows the treadmill. The other is learning what it feels like to step into something wider and slower and more deliberate. I'm interested in the mark of time — in the idea that beauty is a process.

I've spent years painting presence. The moment when something quiet becomes something alive. It turns out I'm in the middle of that same process myself.

I don't know exactly what comes next. But I'm in — fully, both feet — for whatever it is.

In the studio right now: Aperture, 41x41, part of the Between Heaven and Earth series. And a new direction still taking shape — figures that aren't quite figures, emerging from abstract marks. Presence without literalness. I've been circling this for years. I finally have the time to follow where it leads.

If you want to watch it unfold, I'm in the studio. Come find me.