California Love
Eight paintings from one poem.
The poem this collection came from
I left New York for California because I wanted an adventure. That is the version I told people, and it was true enough. The longer version is that I had been living the life I was supposed to want. There is a script for it. The right career, the right address, the picket fence, the kind of success other people can recognize at a glance. I had built a lot of it, and from the outside it looked like an answer. It just was not my answer.
So I went looking. Mountains, coastline, distance. Anything that felt like more. What I found out there was that I had brought everything with me. The monsters were not waiting back east. They got in the car. No enemy but me to blame for the war that was in my head.
That is where the searching turned around. It stopped being about the next place and started being about what I was carrying. I laid the sword down. I got lost in nature instead of drama. I gave myself time to think.
These eight paintings are what that turn looked like. Restless at the start. Loud and dark in the middle. Quiet by the end. The last canvas is flat warm water with nowhere left to get to.
I came to California chasing something else. Looking for adventure, but instead I found myself.
I spent a long career studying why people choose what they choose. A psychology degree first, then years of brand strategy, which is really applied psychology with a deadline. Somewhere in the middle of all that I started writing poems, and eventually I started painting them.
I work in Los Angeles, in acrylic and mixed media, mostly in landscape. Mostly not the landscape in front of me. I am painting what happened to me while I was standing there, which is a different thing and usually a louder one.
I start with a poem
Every painting begins as a line I wrote before I ever picked up a brush. The poem holds the feeling. The painting holds what the feeling looked like once it landed in a place, a ridge, a shoreline, a road going somewhere I hadn't been yet.
I work in acrylic and mixed media, in landscape, but I'm not painting the view. I'm painting what happened to me in front of it. The color is emotional before it's accurate. The sky is pink because that's how it felt, not because that's how it was. Abstraction is what lets me tell the truth about a moment instead of just describing it.
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