Every painting starts with a moment of recognition — something that stops me in my tracks and won't let go. Here's how I find those moments and follow them to the canvas.
People often ask me how I decide what to paint. The honest answer is that most of the time, I don't decide — the subject finds me. There's a particular quality of attention that painting trains you to have, a kind of heightened readiness to be stopped by something. A wine glass catching afternoon light. A vineyard row disappearing into morning fog. A cat sitting in a patch of sun. When that stopping happens, and the image lodges itself somewhere behind my eyes and won't leave, I know I have a painting.
Wine country is an endlessly generous place to be a painter. The subject matter is inherently beautiful — the vine rows with their geometric precision, the weathered barns and winery buildings, the quality of light in a valley surrounded by hills. But it's also a place with layers of human meaning: the craft of winemaking, the culture of pleasure and hospitality, the particular way that wine connects people to place and time. A painting of Rochioli at Willi's isn't just a painting of a wine glass — it's a painting of a specific wine, a specific restaurant, a specific moment in wine country culture. That layering of meaning is what makes a subject worth painting.
Still life subjects work differently. They're chosen rather than found — I arrange them, light them, study them over days before I touch the canvas. This deliberateness is its own kind of pleasure. I might spend an afternoon just moving a single object a few inches to the left, watching how the relationship between forms changes. A great still life is a composed world, small and perfect, where every element has been considered.
What I look for in any subject, whether it finds me or I find it, is the quality the French call je ne sais quoi — literally "I don't know what." Something that makes the image shimmer slightly in my imagination, that makes me feel that there's more there than I can immediately explain. That shimmer is what I chase. When I find it, painting is easy. When I don't, no amount of technical skill will save the work.