Last year I took a knife to a painting. This year, I learned to take the paint away.

If you saw Deconstructing Color at the Ojai Valley Museum, you saw a body of work born from a single four-by-nine-foot oil painting. I cut it into strips and shards, then reassembled the pieces into something new. That series taught me that a painting isn't finished just because it's whole. Sometimes it has to come apart before it can speak.

My new work carries that lesson somewhere quieter. I call these pieces fields of color. Each one begins, as always, with meditation, a request for help in a process of heartfelt, loving co-creation. Then I build the surface in layers of oil on paper, one veil of color over another, until the paper is saturated and alive.

And then I begin to take it away.

Scraping paint away is a different kind of listening. Adding is about intention; removing is about trust. I'm no longer deciding what to put in. I'm discovering what was already there. Earlier layers rise to meet me: a blue-green glowing through a violet haze, a warm ochre surfacing beneath a cool field. What remains isn't less than what I started with. It's truer.

I think that holds beyond the studio, too. So much of life asks us to add more effort, more noise, more to carry. These paintings remind me that clarity often comes through subtraction, from letting go of what we don't need so that what matters can breathe.

Stand in front of one of these fields and you may feel the same thing happen in you. Your eye slows down. The edges soften. Colors that seemed to sit still begin to move.

I would love for you to experience them in person. My studio will be open for the Ojai Studio Artists Fall Tour:

Opening reception: Friday, October 9, 5-7 PM, Ojai Valley Museum
Open studio: Saturday & Sunday, October 10-11, 10 AM-5 PM
566 Avenida de la Vereda, Ojai

Come see what's left when the extra falls away. I think you'll find it's everything.

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