A Practice of Returning

There is a kind of freedom in not knowing . In letting something move through before you reach for it.

When I paint, I stay present - to the sounds, the physical sensations, the slow emergence of color and form. There is a direct line between what sits just beneath the surface and what eventually appears on canvas. These moments come from intention.

I’ve recently been drawn to Plato’s Symposium. Reading it, I find myself settling into a kind of knowing I’ve always felt but lacked the language for.

There is an idea within it that beauty is not the thing itself, but what it points to. That we recognize as beautiful is only a glimpse - a surface reflection of something more complete, more whole, just out of reach. Painting lives in that tension for me. Not in capturing beauty, but in following it. In staying with the moment before it settles into something known.

Maybe love lives there too. Not in possession. Not in arrival. But in movement toward something we recognize, even if we cannot fully explain it.

I don't always know what is emerging when I paint, but I trust the movement of it. I trust the moment it asks to be followed.