What My Paintings Are Actually About

People who find this site usually come in one of two ways. They've seen El Bandito somewhere — on a tee, in a social post, on someone's wall — and they want to know more. Or they searched for oil paintings and ended up here more or less by accident.

Either way, they end up looking through the work, and eventually someone asks the same question: what do you paint?

I give the same short answer every time. Western figures, California light, animals. It's accurate. It's also not quite enough.

The paintings don't look like they came from the same hand. El Bandito is a cowboy with no face, simple palette, everything stripped back. Angus is a thousand-pound steer dead center on the canvas — heavy, still, almost confrontational. Catch of the Day is a California spiny lobster on a wooden surface, small and luminous, painted close. Then there are bison studies, coastal scenes, and figure work that doesn't fit cleanly into any of those categories.

So here's a longer answer.

The thread running through everything is directness. I want to stand in the presence of something — a subject with weight, history, or color — and put it on canvas in a way that holds attention. Not illustration. Not narrative. Just: here is a thing, painted with enough honesty that you believe it's real.

Western art gets a bad reputation because a lot of it isn't honest. It's romantic in the wrong sense — heroic cowboys, golden plains, the mythology of something that never quite existed. There's a long tradition of painters who love the West genuinely but ended up making paintings that feel like theater sets. Beautiful, sometimes. Empty, often.

I'm not interested in that. El Bandito doesn't have a face because the face would make the painting about a specific person. Take the face away and you get the posture, the hat, the light — the idea of the figure without pinning it to anyone. More universal. More true to how the West actually sits in the cultural imagination.

Angus works differently. The steer isn't a symbol. It's just an animal that exists in the world with an incredible physical presence. The black coat holds light in a specific way. The mass of the body against the negative space around it — that's where the painting happens. I didn't set out to make a statement about American agriculture. I set out to paint a thing that was in front of me, and the painting took care of the rest.

You can shop the El Bandito poster here if you want to start there.

California runs through everything even when I'm not pointing at it. Catch of the Day is a California spiny lobster — the color is extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that deep coral into orange into red. I painted it because the color interested me and the contrast of something ocean-wild laid out on a flat wooden surface felt worth chasing. It became, maybe unintentionally, a painting that could only come from coastal California. The light on it, the specific warmth of the palette — that's here, in this place.

That's what I mean when I say California light. It's not a postcard thing. It's a physics thing. The quality of late afternoon light on the coast, the way a clear January day makes distant mountains sharp and close, what summer haze does to shadows — this place has a particular visual language. I've been learning to speak it for years, and I don't think I'm done.

What I've landed on is that the western subject and the California setting don't cancel each other out. They're the same thing. California was working ranch land — and in a lot of places still is. The cowboy hat and the Pacific don't have to be opposites. They're both real, and real is what I'm after.

The best I can do is put the work in front of you and let it do whatever it does. If something stops you — holds your eye a second longer than you expected — that's the painting working. That's the whole point.

You can see all the available originals and reproductions in the shop. And if you're new here, El Bandito is usually where people start.