Every Day a Different Painting
Reflected light from a stain glass window.
I spent the weekend out in the desert and the mountains outside of Los Angeles and stayed in acharming little cabin in the woods. When we arrived we spent an hour or so getting settled, andfamiliar. At one point I walked into the mudroom where there was a stained glass window in thedoor. The afternoon light was coming through it and as I turned around, I saw all the colorsreflected on the opposite wall and was enchanted; gorgeous light, gorgeous color, gorgeousshapes. I popped out my phone and took photos. This is how paintings begin; sensitivity to the moment when something grabs your attention, grabs your feelings, grabs your sense of "wow."It can be a positive wow, or a not so positive wow, but it just found its way into your body as amemory. Science and medicine is also trending towards the somatic resonance housed in the body. Releasing it, letting it out so it doesn't harm you. Painting is my way of doing that.
We are all telephone poles bringing in life. The only difference between us is the awareness level. I am constantly aware of it, walking around my life and my world, taking it in. That moment will then come out in the studio unexpectedly or deliberately, never as a literal representation, but as a translation of it. It might be days or years from resurfacing, but it will.
This is something I have been doing all of my life. Taking life and translating it. I recently came across the word “pareidolia” which in itself is not a moment, rather it's a mode. It's how a fully alive human being engages with anything and everything made with enough depth, enough truth. The painting, the book, the symphony, the poem, the reflected light on the wall, those thingsdon't change. The words were written once, the musical notes were combined once, the light was exactly that way once, the day you just lived through was a singular unique moment no matter how routine you felt it was. You are the one changing. Every time. And because the work was made from something true and unresolved, it has enough feeling in it to meet whoever you are today.
What makes a work capable of that, in any medium, is that the maker didn't over-explain it. Left it alive instead of resolved. The receiver has to complete it. And since you're never quite the same person twice, the completion is always slightly different.
I received a compliment from a collector who has purchased several of my paintings over the years. He said, "I love living with your paintings. Every day presents me with something new to respond to and I never get tired of the discovery." I sat with that for a long time.
He's describing embodied cognition, pareidolia, and mirror neurons without knowing any of those words. He just knows the painting is alive.
This isn't unique to painting. It's the book you've read four times. The symphony that breaks you open differently depending on what you're carrying that day. Pareidolia is not a quirk of visual perception, it’s the fundamental mechanism of how humans receive any art made with enough depth to stay open. Mobile, not static. The receiver always completes the work. And this isn't a capacity reserved for artists or collectors or people who know the word pareidolia. It's what makes us human. Everyone has it. The painting just creates the conditions for you to find it.If I leave it unresolved, honest, raw, there is room there for you as well. It's why a painting attracts you, why you might choose to live with it. You find pieces of yourself there. Remember Maya Angelou's quote"We are all more alike than we are different"?
The gift comes from the maker's body and from yours. From the feeling that moved through someone's hand before their mind had words for it. The maker didn't know exactly what they were giving, what arrived was bigger than what they intended. That's transmission. Something real passed from one human nervous system through a painted surface into another. Across time. Across lives. My collector standing in front of my painting in 2026, receiving something I felt in the studio in 2021 without knowing what it was yet. And it will keep doing that long after both of us are gone. That's the reason for buying art. For living with art.
I make paintings that looked like the light on the wall before I ever saw that reflection in the cabin. That's not a flaw in the work. That's the whole point of the work.