Why I Stopped Thinking About the Viewer While I Paint

There was a stretch of about eighteen months where I was constantly thinking about the wall. Whose wall, specifically. What kind of room it would hang in, what the buyer's taste might be, what would move at a show versus what would sit in the storage racks until I moved it myself.

The paintings from that period aren't in the store. Some of them aren't anywhere. They weren't bad, technically. But they had a quality I couldn't name until much later — a kind of flatness that had nothing to do with color or value. You could feel that they were made for someone else's approval. And somehow that showed.

The strange thing is, the moment I started making work I had no obvious business making — work I was doing because the optical problem genuinely interested me, not because I thought it would sell — is when things started actually connecting.

The Painting That Made the Point

LA Woman is a good example. I painted her the way I paint studies: committed, not overly precious, not thinking too hard about what comes next. She's a California figure, dark hair, that particular quality you get in an interior when the afternoon light comes in at a low angle and everything goes warm while the shadows go cool. I wasn't thinking about a collector. I was thinking about the shape of the light falling on her shoulder and whether I could get the temperature shift right between the light side and the shadow without overworking it.

That painting has been one of the most consistently visited pages on the site since I put it up. I don't think that's a coincidence.

There's something visible in a painting when the maker was genuinely absorbed. I can't fully explain what it is — maybe it lives in the marks themselves, in the confidence of a stroke made by someone who wasn't second-guessing, in the way the paint sits when you laid it down and left it alone. Whatever it is, people feel it, even when they don't have the vocabulary to name it. They just know the painting is alive in a way some others aren't.

The Same Lesson, Off the Canvas

About two years ago, I was at a friend's place in Venice when the roommate came back from a nearby flea market holding a hand-painted tee — heather gray Gildan, yellow flower on the front, cost three dollars from whoever had a folding table on Abbot Kinney that afternoon. The shirt was completely unpretentious. Nobody made it to hit a market. Someone made it because they had paint and a shirt and something to say.

That shirt stuck with me. It was the thing that started the whole apparel line. And El Bandito — a cowboy with no face, the first design I put on a tee — is still the best seller by a solid margin.

Not because it was designed to be a bestseller. Because it was designed honestly.

What This Means for Commissions

This doesn't mean being careless or self-indulgent. Studio discipline matters. Technical rigor matters. I'm not making an argument for doing whatever you feel like with no regard for craft or the person on the other end.

But I am making an argument for a particular kind of focus: on the problem in front of you, on what the painting needs, rather than on what you imagine the painting should do for someone's living room. Even with a commission — where there is a specific person at the other end — my job isn't to give them exactly what they pictured in their head. It's to solve the painting, and let that solution be what they didn't know to ask for. The commissions that go best are always the ones where the client trusted me enough to let that happen.

The Long Game

The art market, at every level, rewards trend-chasing in the short run and punishes it over time. The painters whose work keeps circulating, keeps finding rooms to hang in years after they made it, are the ones who were stubbornly doing their own thing in their own voice for reasons that had very little to do with the market at all.

Not because they were trying to be authentic. Because they were too absorbed in the work to think about it.

I try to stay in that second category. Some days I manage it. Some days I catch myself thinking about the wall again. When that happens, I usually take it as a sign that something else needs my attention — anything that gets me back to looking at the problem in front of me rather than projecting forward to an imaginary viewer.

The viewer, when they show up, will know the difference.