My Creation Series is a body of work that became an important turning point, very early in my career —not because I set out to create something that would resonate so widely, but because the response grew organically from the way I was instinctively painting.
Early in my career, I began pushing oil and acrylic paints beyond the way they were traditionally meant to behave. I thinned them heavily with water and medium, sometimes to the point that I was essentially asking oils and acrylics to surrender their weight and permanence and behave more like watercolor. I worked with an abundance of liquid, allowing pigment to travel across the surface, pool, separate, collide, and settle. I used hair dryers to introduce air and movement, directing the paint without completely controlling it. Water carried the color. Air redirected it. Gravity had its say. My hand initiated the process, but I learned to leave room for the materials themselves to participate in the making of the work.
There was something deeply natural about painting this way. I wasn't trying to develop a recognizable technique; it was simply the way I wanted the paint to move. But, interestingly, that is exactly what happened.
The process became identifiable as my own, and before long, other artists began reaching out to me, asking how I was getting the paint to behave this way—how I created that movement, those veils and passages of color, and that sense of something forming almost organically on the surface.
I found that remarkable because I hadn't arrived at the technique by following a formula. I had arrived there by instinct—by experimenting, pushing the materials, and asking paint to do things it wasn't necessarily intended to do. What felt completely natural to me had quietly become a visual language that other people could recognize.
And collectors recognized it too.
The Creation Series began receiving a tremendous amount of attention. I started receiving emails not only from collectors across the United States, but from people around the world who were seeing something in these paintings that I hadn't consciously put there. Again and again, people told me that the work reminded them of looking down at the Earth from space. Some even began sending me satellite and aerial images to show me what they were seeing.
When I began comparing those images to my paintings, I was blown away.
Suddenly, I could see it too—the suggestion of continents and waterways, atmospheric formations, scorched earth and fertile ground, oceans meeting land, something simultaneously ancient and still in the process of becoming. None of it had been intentionally painted as landscape, yet somehow the paintings seemed to contain landscapes of their own.
It made me think differently about the very materials and forces I was using: water, air, earth-like pigments, movement, gravity and chance. They are elemental. And when I think about the elements coming together—forming, separating, destroying, rebuilding—I think of creation. That realization ultimately gave the series its name.
There is beauty in this series, but it doesn't arrive without struggle. Areas of pale blue and luminous white seem to open and breathe, while darker passages gather, descend and interrupt them. Rust, earth, smoke and water appear to coexist on the same surface.
The painting can feel peaceful and turbulent, wounded and hopeful, expansive and confined—all at once. That duality is something collectors have spoken to me about for years. People have described these paintings as doing two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. They can feel sad and happy, peaceful and unsettling, dark and hopeful. Some have even described them as conveying a struggle between good and evil.
I find that fascinating because I never dictate which side the viewer should see. The paintings seem capable of changing depending upon what someone brings to them. One person may be drawn immediately to the light, while another sees the darkness first. Neither experience is wrong. Perhaps both are present.
There was something incredibly affirming about creating from such an instinctive place and discovering that others were so deeply drawn to the result. More than twenty years later, many collectors still tell me that this remains their favorite style of my work and the body of work they feel most connected to.
As an artist, you might spend years experimenting, searching and following instincts you don't always fully understand. Other times it just flows naturally from you, like the Creation series did for me. Sometimes you recognize what you are creating only after someone else sees it and reflects it back to you.
That was very much the experience of the Creation Series for me. What began simply as my desire to let paint move differently became a language of its own. Creation is rarely a clean or orderly act. Things collide. They resist. They dissolve and reform. Water moves one way, air pushes another, and somewhere between intention and surrender, something begins to emerge. There is uncertainty in that process. There is struggle. And somewhere within all of it, something beautiful finds its place.
