Life is Fleeting. Pay Attention.

I’ve been thinking lately about what keeps showing up in my work, even when I don’t consciously put it there.

What am I obsessed with?

What tension keeps appearing?

What emotional atmosphere do I create, even when I think I’m painting something completely different?

The words that first came to me were solitude, peace and stillness.

But there is another word that feels even more important: reverence.

I’ve realized that nature has never simply been a subject for me. My experiences in nature have often been the moments when I have felt most aware of something larger than myself—the divine, the mystery of existence, the incredible miracle of simply being alive.

Sometimes it happens in a dramatic moment, standing before the power of the ocean. Other times it can be something as simple as a bird, the changing light, a quiet landscape or the movement of water.

There are moments when everything seems to become very still and I am simply paying attention.

And perhaps that is what I’m continually trying to find my way back to in my paintings.

There is another truth running through the work as well: everything passes.

The tide recedes. The bird flies away. The light changes. Landscapes change. People come and go. We grow older. Experiences become memories.

And yet, somehow, something remains.

I think this is why I am so drawn to surfaces that appear to have a history. I build layers and then cover them. I sand things away. I obscure images and allow fragments to remain. There may be faded writing, maps, marks, or something barely visible beneath the surface.

I love the feeling that something was there before.

And then, among all that evidence of time and passage, there is often some small sign of life—a bird, an animal, a botanical form, a moon, a horizon.

Perhaps what I’m really trying to do is hold onto the sacredness of a fleeting experience.

Not the experience itself. I know I can’t preserve that.

But maybe I can preserve a trace of what it awakened in me.

I don’t think my work is about nostalgia. It’s about remembering those moments when I felt completely present and aware that there was something extraordinary happening simply because I was alive to witness it.

Maybe that is the recurring truth in my work:

Life is fleeting, but it is sacred. Pay attention.

Perhaps that is why I paint.

I am leaving evidence that I was here, that I noticed, that I felt it.

This happened. I was here. And it mattered.