The Title Came First: What I Was After With Tethered Souls

Some paintings get their name when they're finished. You step back, look at what you made, and think: okay, that's what that is. That's how it goes most of the time.

Tethered Souls wasn't like that.

The title came before the paint was close to dry. Before I'd figured out the light, before I'd settled the edges, before I knew whether the thing was going to work at all. When a title arrives that early, you know you've hit something real. You're not describing what the painting looks like. You're telling yourself what you're trying to do.

There are paintings in this studio that are about a place. A coastline, a canyon, a patch of late-afternoon California light I needed to capture before it shifted. Those are good problems to solve, but they're essentially logistical. You're chasing something external.

Then there are paintings where the subject is just the entry point. Where you're using something visible to reach for something that isn't. That's a harder problem. And it's usually the one worth solving.

What "Tethered" Actually Means

It's a Western word, technically. You tether a horse. You tie something that has will and energy and its own ideas about where it wants to go to a fixed point. It's not cruel. It's just the relationship between a creature and a place. We're all attached to things. People, ideas, memories. Sometimes by choice and sometimes by something you can't quite name.

"Souls" is the other half of that tension. A soul is the most untethered thing there is — the part of something that doesn't want to be held down, that persists past the moment. Put those two words next to each other and you have a contradiction. A kite on a string. A wild thing in a still frame.

That's the whole painting. That's the problem I was working out on the canvas.

Why Oil Paint for This

Oil paint carries weight in a way other mediums don't. Watercolor floats. Oil sits. When you build up layers and work them while they're still wet, you get a quality of presence — something that's here, that's substantial. That physical quality matters when you're trying to paint something that's supposed to feel like it means something beyond itself.

The palette I kept returning to was warm in the shadows and cooler at the edges. Nothing that announces itself. Just that gradual feeling of light pulling back from something quieter. When I'm working on connection, on two things in relationship, I stay away from anything that shouts. I want the eye to settle. To look. To stay.

There are passages in Tethered Souls where the paint is thin — where you can almost see through to the ground. That was intentional, not a sign that I didn't know what I was doing. Some things are better half-seen. The viewer's imagination does work that the brush can't.

Knowing When to Stop

I made decisions on this one that I wouldn't have made earlier in my career. Knowing when a painting is done — when another mark would actually cost you something — is learned slowly, usually the hard way. There's a version of this painting that I almost kept going on. I'm glad I didn't.

The restraint is the point. A tethered thing is held back. There's supposed to be a sense of something being kept from going further.

The original is oil on canvas and it's available in the shop. If you want to live with this one but aren't ready to commit to the original, there are now reproductions available: a standard poster starting at $28, and a framed version starting at $65 for those of you who want it ready to hang.

This is one of those paintings that you either get immediately or you need to sit with for a while. Either way is fine.