Search Party – An Artist’s Reflection

“Search Party” is the newest painting in my “Large Events” series, an ongoing exploration in my art studio. Measuring eight by six feet, it slowly developed over several months, growing with each return to the canvas. The abstraction reveals layers of complexity, yet also reflects the patience and uncertainty that come with a gradual, evolving process. As with life, I believe art isn't meant to be understood at a glance.

So often, it seems, the art world comes around to claims that painting is dead. I cannot agree. For me, painting is inseparable from being alive—each work lets me witness and participate in the world as it is, in real time. Painting brings me back to the present and reminds me that art is a living process, never finished or obsolete. As the tenth painting in the series, “Search Party” continues my search for ways to approach the vastness and unpredictability of experience through abstraction. Each painting is its own journey, marked by periods of activity and long intervals where the work simply waits, gradually taking shape through accumulated decisions and changes of heart.

With “Search Party,” I returned again and again over about eight months. The painting would sit in the studio for weeks at a time, then I’d come back to it with fresh eyes—sometimes making only a small change, sometimes reworking large areas. In this way, the canvas became layered not just with paint, but with time and the changing moods of my life. Rather than a battle, the process felt like a quiet, ongoing conversation between myself and the work, each pause or revision adding something essential to its final form.

SEARCH PARTY

8 FOOT X 6 FOOT

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS

$5400.00

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE TEXT ME

Visually, “Search Party” results from repeated layering—forms and colors that shift, overlap, and sometimes disappear, only to resurface much later. The painting drifts between order and moments of uncertainty. I see in its surface the slow build-up of doubts, small choices, and the kinds of discoveries that only come from working without a set outcome in mind. Each mark traces this slow conversation between intention and response.

For me, painting is about shaping chaos into something that feels balanced or whole. Each new canvas begins in the zeitgeist, our shared collective creative energy source, with forms and ideas competing and shifting. Through patient work—adding, removing, and reconsidering—I look for a sense of order that feels authentic to my experience. The process is not about control, but about being attentive to when the painting starts to resonate, as if the muse I’ve been quietly following steps forward at last. That moment can’t be forced or predicted. When it happens, I know to stop. I am less interested in illustrating specific stories or ideas, and more in discovering what emerges naturally over time. When a painting finally settles into itself, even if the feeling is subtle or unresolved, I let it be.

“Search Party” isn’t meant to offer answers. At times, it feels unresolved or simply present in a way that resists resolution. Perhaps, like life, it holds complexity and change, asking for a slower kind of attention. If there is searching here, it belongs as much to my process as to anyone who spends time with the painting.

In “Search Party,” I was looking for, or sometimes just noticing, a moment of clarity within all the complexity. The painting became a record of months spent in the studio—of changes, reversals, and the passage of time. It is only one moment in the longer arc of the “Large Events” series, and a bold yet strangely quiet meditation on the way the art of painting and living are always intertwined.