Connecting the Dots

August 15, 2025

In the beginning, painting feels like instinct more than intention. You're reaching for colors without knowing why, following shapes, repeating gestures, layering without any clear destination. You might paint figures for months, then suddenly turn to abstract marks or landscapes or vessels. It doesn’t always feel connected. It feels like you’re chasing something just out of frame. You're caught in the immediacy of making, in the pull of the brush, the smell of the medium, the tension between canvas and idea. And that’s enough, for a while.

But the longer you work, the more you paint, the further you go, something begins to shift. Without trying, without even noticing at first, you start to circle back. Certain themes reappear. A color palette you thought was a one-off starts showing up again, this time with more certainty. The same gestures return, a way of dragging paint, of blurring edges, of burying and revealing. At first, they feel coincidental. But over time, you begin to see them for what they are: constants. The quiet bones of your practice.

This realization doesn’t arrive in a moment of clarity; it unfolds gradually, like stepping back from a large canvas you’ve been nose-to-surface with for too long. When you're deep in the work, it's hard to see the full picture. Each painting feels isolated, like a single piece of something unfinished. But with time, and maybe more importantly, with distance, you begin to see the connections. What once felt scattered now starts to form a language. You recognize the puzzle you’ve been assembling all along, even if the image is still coming into focus.

It’s only by painting through the uncertainty, over months and years, that you begin to understand what’s truly been guiding your hand. It’s not always conscious, and that’s the beauty of it. Your hand knows before your mind does. There’s a pattern in your obsessions, in the forms you return to, in the way you handle space and weight and stillness. These aren’t just habits, they’re clues. Markers of what your work is trying to say, even if you haven’t found the words yet.

And the thing is, you can’t force this clarity. You have to earn it. You have to get far enough away from your own work to see it for what it is. Like beginning a puzzle with all the pieces scattered across a table, early on, it’s a mess. It’s hard to believe it could ever become something whole. But little by little, you find connections. You build edges, link shapes, match tones. And then one day, you glance back at a wall of your paintings and realize: they’re talking to each other. They’ve been talking all along.

This is the long arc of painting. The deeper you go, the clearer it becomes, not in the sense of having all the answers, but in beginning to understand the questions your work has always been asking. The throughlines. The obsessions. The voice beneath the brushwork. But you only get there by painting. Again and again. Letting the work accumulate. Letting time do its part. The dots don’t connect until they’re ready. But when they do, it’s like seeing your own language written out for the first time, strange, familiar, and completely yours.