Rarefied Air

There’s a particular kind of isolation that can come with painting seriously over time. As your work deepens, the sense of shared ground with others can start to thin out, and you find yourself in a quieter, more internal space. What fills that space, at least for me, is a kind of ongoing conversation with painters who are no longer here. Looking at their work isn’t passive, it feels active, almost like standing in front of the canvas with them, trying to understand the decisions they made, the risks they took, and the way they pushed paint to carry something more than just an image. In that sense, painting becomes less about competing with what’s around you now and more about responding to something that’s been unfolding for centuries.

There’s a clarity in that dialogue that’s hard to find in the present moment. The noise of trends, visibility, and constant output falls away, and what remains is the work itself, direct, unresolved, and often far more honest. When you spend time with those paintings, you start to see beyond technique into a way of thinking, a level of commitment that isn’t concerned with approval or positioning. It shifts your own approach. You stop looking outward for validation and instead measure your work against something deeper, something that asks more of you.

Painting, then, becomes a kind of long conversation that moves across time rather than within it. You’re not just making images, you’re engaging with a lineage, testing your instincts against those who have already pushed the medium to its limits. It’s a demanding place to stand, but it’s also grounding. In that exchange, the isolation softens, replaced by a sense that you’re part of something continuous, something that doesn’t rely on proximity or recognition, but on the act of painting itself and the questions it keeps asking.