The Long Practice

For the time being, I have stopped painting.

For more than forty years, painting has defined my existence. It has been my daily discipline, my way of understanding the world, my place of inquiry and refuge. There have been brief interruptions—periods of extended travel when photography took precedence, or moments when life delivered a blow so heavy it was impossible to lift a brush to canvas. When my oldest daughter died, painting simply fell away. There was no decision involved. It was just gone.

Recently, the pause has come for different reasons.

Many hours have been spent writing—especially completing my travel memoir, The Weight of Air. (Available now by donation—here)  The memoir is largely taken from posts found here, in My Fairy-Tale Life. In 2008 I went around the world for one year and lived in 25 countries. Along with me came my paints and camera. 

The writing demanded a different kind of attention, one that left little room for paint. At the same time, I found myself uncertain about what to paint. Not how, but what. The familiar urgency wasn’t there, and forcing it felt dishonest.

In the meantime, ideas did not disappear. They simply shifted direction.

There has been photography—new work, still unfolding. There have been final revisions to the memoir, shaping it into an e-book, letting it take its own form. Poetry has crept in quietly. And lately, something unexpected has emerged: a new series built from old ground.

Over decades, I accumulated hundreds of figure drawings. They were never meant as finished works—mostly studies, explorations, moments of attention. Mostly female forms, some male. They lived in drawers, folders, and eventually in digital archives. I rarely looked back at them.

Now I have.

Using these drawings as a foundation, I’ve begun combining them digitally with photographs of graffiti, walls, weathered surfaces, and street textures gathered from years of wandering across cities and countries. The figures—intimate, vulnerable, inward—meet the marks of public space: abrasion, repetition, accident, history. The collision has produced something neither source could accomplish alone.

The results have surprised me.

They feel less like paintings and more like conversations—between past and present, private and public, line and scar. Some figures sit, wait, turn inward. Others lean, stretch, confront. They are not heroic. They are human. They exist within surfaces that have already lived a life.

This way of working suits where I am right now. My temperament has always been to follow an idea when it arrives, even if it runs counter to previous directions. Perhaps it’s the adventurer’s impulse—one I’ve written about before. I’ve learned to trust it.

I don’t know when paint and canvas will call again. For now, attention has simply moved elsewhere, and that feels honest. This pause isn’t absence or loss; it’s another way of listening. The work continues, just not in the way it once did. And for the moment, that feels right.