Journal

Painting as Simple Restoration

After years of working as a Harvard-trained designer and formally trained painter, my professional work moves between the institutional scale of building and the human scale of a painting. While architecture today is most often a complex industry of products and waste, my studio practice is where making becomes direct and simple.

I paint primarily from memory, embracing its inherent blur and impermanence. Less interested in a literal reproduction of the world, I pay homage to nature as a site of sublime experience.

The artist Louise Bourgeois famously stated that “Art is restoration”¹—the idea that the creative process is a way to repair the disparate remnants that fear and anxiety leave behind. I view my practice as restorative personal labor. It is an act of intention where I transform fragments of unsettling histories and remembered visual landscapes into imperfect abstractions as a space for contemplation.

The Poetics of the Home

The domestic space is where a person most often feels a heightened sense of ownership of a physical space. Throughout the rest of their day, they might encounter a variety of environments where they feel only a partial belonging, if that.

I focus on the domestic scale in artmaking because I believe it can make the greatest impact on our daily quality of life. Gaston Bachelard describes the “poetics of smallness”²—the idea that a modest scale can be quite powerful.

For much of the twentieth century, the home as a stage for art was dismissed in favor of more formal, public settings. I believe the home is a radical space for art; as philosopher Emanuele Coccia describes, it is a "moral topography" where we ascribe meaning to our lives and build our happiness.³

Beyond the Gallery

Having designed gallery spaces, I understand the engineering involved in abstracting architectural detail—down to the intentional disappearance of a common baseboard for a sleek reveal and the precise angle, spacing, and temperature of an artificial lighting grid.

The “white cube” is a sensationally minimal space designed to reduce the noise surrounding viewing. I personally indulge in the theatre of gallery and museum spaces, but I also understand the “sanitization” of place involved in the making of highly clean and contemporary art spaces.⁴ Creating large-scale works specifically for the large-scale version of this architectural type, without a firm cause, tends to give me an initial excitement followed by a material anxiety regarding potential waste. 

Unless a commission demands a public or monumental dialogue, I prioritize a sustainable, human-centric scale that avoids the performative “grandeur” of the highly curated art market. My recent interest focuses on galleries, collectives, and advisories that champion an approachable path to collectorship. These spaces prioritize a modesty of scale and transparent accessibility—whether through a variety of price points and online price transparency to reduce intimidation, or by showcasing work within their own domestic settings.

Minimizing Studio Waste

Material concerns have led me to build a studio practice rooted in material accountability. Much like specifying for a healthy building, I have worked to eliminate petroleum-based products from my oil painting process.

I prioritize sourcing paper from environmentally conscious mills and wood that is either FSC-certified or grown in regenerative forests. Within the studio, I maintain a ‘low-to-no-waste’ policy—recycling, reclaiming, and reusing old painting substrates, and utilizing the same tube of oil paint across two decades.

By dedicating a portion of every sale to causes like One Tree Planted and other environmental advocacies, the transaction of selling a piece of art imbues additional meaning and becomes an act of external reciprocity—a deliberate effort to return something to the environment that provides my raw materials.

Inquiry

I would love to hear from you: Who are your favorite artists dedicated to a materially conscious practice? Do you know of a few galleries or collectives that are currently championing accessibility in art collectorship? 

Works Cited

1. Bourgeois, Louise. Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997. Edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, MIT Press, 1998.

2. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Orion Press, 1964.

3. Coccia, Emanuele. Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness. Translated by Richard Dixon, Penguin Books, 2024.

4. O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Lapis Press, 1986.