My Process and Style
Every painting I make begins with a place that stopped me.
I photograph obsessively... coastlines, parks, city streets, the geometry of things most people walk past without looking. When a image has the right charge to it, I know. There's a quality of light, or a compositional tension, or a mood that I can feel before I can name it. Those are the images I paint from.
The medium
I work in oil and cold wax on wood panel. Oil and cold wax is an encaustic-adjacent medium that produces a surface unlike anything else... matte, luminous, with a depth that seems to come from inside the paint rather than sitting on top of it. I mix Gamblin oil paint with cold wax medium at roughly equal parts, which produces a stiff, sculptural consistency that holds every mark I make.
Wood panel is the only substrate that makes sense for this work. It's rigid enough to take the physical pressure of palette knife and scraping tools without flexing, and strong enough to hold the weight of thick impasto without warping over time.
The surface
I build texture deliberately and structurally, not decoratively. Heavy impasto — paint applied thick enough to cast its own shadows — changes how light moves across the surface at different times of day and from different viewing angles. A painting in morning light and the same painting in afternoon light are not quite the same painting. That aliveness is the point.
I use palette knives almost exclusively, working the paint in layers... applying, scraping back, applying again. The history of those decisions stays in the surface. You can see it, and sometimes feel it with your fingertips.
The translation
I don't paint what I see. I paint what I felt when I saw it.
My reference images go through a process of radical simplification on the way to the panel. I push subjects toward abstraction... stripping away literal detail until what remains are the shapes, colors, and contrasts that carried the emotional weight of the original experience. The goal is always the same: to make the viewer feel the place before they fully recognize it. That moment of catching up — the quiet click of recognition — is what I'm always chasing.
Color
I work with high contrast and saturated, non-realistic color. The orange in a cliff face might be pushed toward red. The shadow in a wave might be almost violet. I'm not documenting light... I'm amplifying it, finding the version of the scene that feels more true than a photograph could.
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