Studio ·
Notes From Three Studios
Laguna Beach taught me colour. Hawaiian Gardens taught me interiority. The work carries both now.
Almost everything from 2023 and 2024 was painted in Laguna Beach, with ocean light doing half the work. You can see it in those canvases — the blues are actual Pacific blues, the warmth is the actual late-afternoon warmth that comes off the hills. I did not fully understand how much the room paints alongside you until I left it.
The 2025 works came from Hawaiian Gardens, a different California entirely — inland, ordinary, quiet. Without the ocean to look at, the work turned inward, and A Journey Into His Mind is what it found there: rings, orbs, and fields of warmth and blue — an architecture you cannot photograph because it only exists from the inside.
I am painting somewhere new again now, and I have stopped being precious about it. The studio changes, the light changes, the work absorbs it all and keeps going. Wherever the easel stands, the subject has never really moved: it was always the interior weather, and that travels with me.