Travel: Places and Passages

Paintings inspired by places I’ve traveled and the moments that stayed with me. Each one is less about capturing a place exactly as it was, and more about painting what it felt like to be there.

Why I paint places

I’ve always loved the way a place can become tied to a particular moment in your life. Years later, it might be the color of the water, the light on a building, or a view from somewhere high up that brings the whole feeling rushing back.

When I paint from my travels, I’m not trying to recreate exactly what I saw. I’m trying to get back to what it felt like to stand there. The colors might get brighter, the landscape might shift a little, and memory fills in some of the gaps.

For me, these paintings are a way of keeping a little piece of a place after I’ve left it.

A year in the making

I started this painting from a small gouache color study after a family trip to Sicily. We had just spent a month traveling through Northern Europe, and arriving in this little hilltop town to sunshine, warmth and that impossibly blue sea felt exhilarating.

The painting sat unfinished in my studio for almost a year. I kept coming back to it, changing things and pushing the color until it finally felt more like my memory of that day than the actual view.

That’s what I love about painting places. Sometimes the longer I’m away from them, the clearer it becomes what I actually want to remember.