Giants

Healing required total geographical and creative displacement. I found it on the edge of the continent in Monterey Bay, California.

For five years, I worked out of a massive 3,000-square-foot sanctuary in a leaky historic cannery building—the American Tin Cannery. The rent was an unbelievable $100 a month. After years in New York, that radical shift in space, geography and overhead changed my relationship with the work entirely.

I had seen Williamsburg and Chelsea at their cusps—different moments when neighborhoods, artists and the art world around them were transforming from one thing into another. Eventually, I needed to disappear from all of it myself.

Away from the transactional static of Manhattan, the work expanded. The deep, heavy, immense scale of the Pacific entered the canvas. Moisture entered it too. This was the era of the oceanic giants—large works born from silence, dampness and the vast, slow-moving rhythm of the coast.

It was during this period of recovery and grounding that I met my wife, and with her came a deeper sense of home that had very little to do with the art world.

The Desert: Turquoise and Phosphorescence

In 2020, as the world shifted, we made another leap—from the edge of the Pacific into the raw expanse of the New Mexico high desert.

Settling in Cerrillos, the work changed again. The damp, heavy atmosphere of Monterey dried beneath the intense high-altitude sun, exposing something more geological underneath. Minerals, dust, stone, turquoise and an enormous sky began finding their way into the paintings.

And then came phosphorescence: paintings that absorbed daylight and returned something different in darkness.

Sky High, 2026
84 × 84 inches
Turquoise powder, phosphorescence, silver leaf, quartz powder, marble powder, pigment and polymer on canvas
View the work →

But there is no final transformation.

Looking back, the work his always returning to the source and occasionally arriving somewhere new. One process simply opens the door to another. The ocean led to the desert. The damp calcified. Mineral became light. Day opened into night. Each painting, material and place has been another stepping stone—or perhaps another rung on a ladder—to some further plane of perception.

The coastal giants haven’t disappeared. Their scale and presence remain inside the newer work, now meeting the spacious turquoise phosphorescence of the desert floor and Southwestern sky.

Looking back at the noise of New York’s Chelsea from the silence of Cerrillos, I no longer see these geographical displacements as escapes. They were part of the work itself: successive environments stripping something away, adding something else, and changing what I was capable of seeing.

Perhaps there is no destination or fixed zone in any of it.

Only another way of seeing from where you happen to be standing.