Milk and Honey Day 13: The Difference Between a Source and a Painting

One of the things people are often surprised by when they see my process is how little the final painting sometimes resembles the original source material.

Partly because a source and a painting are not actually the same thing.

And partly because sometimes I do not even use a true source at all.

A lot of the time I build more of a mood board than a direct reference. I collect fragments. Colors I know I want to explore. Textures. Symbols, generic landscapes with interesting shapes. Atmosphere. Small visual moments that feel emotionally connected even if they do not logically belong together yet.

Then I start layering.

That part is hard to explain if you are not a painter because the process feels less like executing a plan and more like uncovering something gradually through response and revision. I usually begin with chaos. Spray paint, collage, acrylic, texture, loose marks, anything that gives me something to react to instead of a blank white canvas staring back at me.

And then eventually the painting starts talking.

Not literally, obviously. But there comes a point where the canvas begins suggesting things I could not have fully planned at the beginning. Certain shapes start emerging naturally. A passage of light suddenly becomes important. A color relationship creates an atmosphere I was not expecting. Entire sections need simplified or pushed farther. Sometimes the painting asks for restraint. Sometimes it asks for destruction first.

The final piece usually reveals itself slowly instead of arriving fully formed.

That is why paintings so often diverge from the original source material.

A source might hold the emotional spark that starts the work, but if I try to copy it too literally, the painting usually loses life somewhere along the way. The atmosphere gets stiff. The movement disappears. The piece starts feeling overexplained instead of alive.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have about painting is that artists are trying to recreate images as accurately as possible. That is definitely not the case for me. I am trying to recreate a feeling.

And feelings do not survive literal translation very well.

That is why abstraction and expressionism became such a natural part of my work over time. The older I get, the less interested I am in perfectly replicating reality and the more interested I become in atmosphere, memory, symbolism, movement, and emotional truth.

I want paintings to feel the way memory and emotions feel.

Not perfectly sharp around every edge, but layered and atmospheric. Some areas dissolving softly while others come into focus with strange clarity. More like remembering a place emotionally than standing inside it physically.

That shift changes the way I make decisions while painting too. I am constantly asking myself what actually matters emotionally inside the piece. Usually it is not the tiny details people assume.

It is the light.
The movement.
The tension between softness and structure.
The feeling of warmth.
The sense of space.
The glow sitting underneath the darker layers.

Everything else can evolve.

Honestly, I think that is part of why this collection feels so personal to me. Milk and Honey was never supposed to become a perfectly polished execution of a predetermined idea. It is growing while I am growing. The paintings are changing while I am changing. The process itself is shaping the work in real time.

And if I am being honest, I think life works that way too.

We start with a vision of where we think we are going, but the final version rarely looks identical to the original plan. Some things have to be scraped back. Some areas need softened. Unexpected layers create depth we never could have planned from the beginning.

Sometimes the most beautiful parts emerge through the revisions.

That is why I trust the process more now than I used to.

Not blindly. Skill still matters. Structure still matters. But there is a point in every painting where control stops being the goal and listening becomes more important.

That is usually where the life enters the work.

And honestly, I think collectors feel that when they stand in front of a painting. They may not know exactly why, but they can sense when a piece still carries evidence of becoming inside it. The layered texture. The softened edges. The hidden marks underneath the surface. The places where the painting stopped being controlled tightly enough to start breathing instead.

Those are almost always the paintings that stay with people the longest.