Painting

I enjoy acrylic painting. I never took professional classes in it, but I rarely hesitate to start painting. The paint night paintings used references.

dawn on the riverside

I walk my labrador retriever, Kali, on the Riverside every morning. It’s been the only rehabilitation I’ve been able to consistently do after my leg injury. We walk the North end of Riverside Park, and it serves as my little escape from the bustle of Manhattan and work. A daily reminder that I am walking and breathing every day. I tried to capture the feeling of life, peace, and movement which I feel when I reach this tree at the end of the park, breathing in the still cool summer morning air.

barren

I made this painting while I was recovering from ankle surgery. I was unable paint this piece as crisp as I had envisioned due to my ongoing pain, but I think I like that it’s rough. The terrain and brush strokes represent what the initial stages of recovery had been like for me.

climbing

I wrote a piece years ago about climbing a mountain. I go step-by-step every day, but when the fog clears and I look up and down the path, I realize I’ve barely made any progress at all towards the peak. I was expressing how I saw my career. The more I climbed, the larger the mountain felt, the faster I rushed up. My painting depicts a view of that same mountain peak from a higher, different mountain. Focusing on climbing, I can overlook so much richness and complexity in the here and now. I forget to celebrate the small wins or allow myself to derail a bit to explore new ideas.

Winter

This is one of the first paintings i did without a reference. I wanted to make something for my mother as a holiday gift. She had recently lost one of our family dogs, Boo, and the other one, Kin, was getting quite old as well. These two pets kept her going when I was a difficult teenager and we were having communication problems. She walked them every day and had this pink jacket she often wore, so I painted a scene of them exploring the winter world together.