Stacked
36 x 48 in; oil and mixed metal leaf
I — Entry Without Agenda
Note: This chapter was recorded months after the piece was completed. There were no voice notes from the session itself — nothing felt urgent enough to capture in the moment. That absence is part of what this chapter is about.
This piece began with a reference photo. A scene I had painted before, in a different material, more literally. The decision to return to it was loose. I drew in the scene, laid in the underpainting, and moved through the session without particular attachment — no strong excitement, nothing monumental. Just the next step.
It was another day in the studio.
What became clear only in retrospect was that the detachment was not indifference. It was the result of something that had already been worked through. Horizon and Ironwood carried the tension, the confusion, the lostness. By the time this piece began, my expectation for what a session needed to feel like — or produce — had shifted. I was no longer waiting for the piece to announce its importance before I gave it full attention.
The smoothness of this painting was not accidental. It was earned by what came before it.
From
Blank panel. Meditatively laying down the composition in large shapes with broad strokes. Another day beginning.
Toward
.jpg)
Underpainting complete. Scene loosely organized, structure in place without pressure toward resolution.
Turning Point
Mid-session. Nothing unresolved. Nothing forced. The work proceeding as itself.
Integration
This is recorded looking back.
At the time, there was nothing particular to say. The underpainting came out fluidly. The scene organized itself. I didn't reach for a voice note because nothing felt stuck.
Looking back, that ease was the content.
It is possible that somewhere beneath the surface there was an assumption that this piece wouldn't matter — that the absence of anxiety meant the absence of stakes. But I don't think that's what it was. I think expectation had simply loosened its grip. Not because the work had become less important, but because I had stopped needing the process to feel a certain way in order to trust it.
The previous two pieces had done that work. This one got to begin clean.
Stacked
I — Entry Without Agenda
II — The Unachievable Standard
The leaf process began with a dance, too loosen and lighten my grip.
After the first layer of leaf was down, I noticed a voice entering. Not the work — the work was proceeding. The voice was evaluative: the leaf placement wasn't quite right, more passes would be needed, and if I had been more aligned, more present, I would have placed it correctly the first time.
This was not a new voice. It carried a standard I had been setting for myself: that full presence in the work should produce a painting that required no revision — that the ideal version of the process would be linear, each mark placed once and correctly. A one-pass painting as evidence of mastery.
The voice arrived as critique of what was present, but the standard it was measuring against was not real. It had never described how a painting actually forms. It was not a creative perception. It was the analytical mind performing evaluation, dressed as discernment.
This chapter records the moment of noticing.
From
The underpainting.
Toward
The piece arrived in one layer of leaf. The composition is sound. And, to achieve clarity and depth in the scene, paint is needed to pull out the structure of the mountains, and clarify the foreground, middle-ground, background.
Turning Point
This is where I could specifically see paint was needed to clean up the edge of the mountain and the shape of the clouds.
Integration
Looking back- I’m so pleased I caught myself in my own trap.
The standard I had set was a double bind. There was no version of the work that could satisfy it.
What shifted was not the painting — it was the recognition that the rule had been invented. Not discovered. Not earned through experience. Made up, momentarily, by a mind that wanted certainty where process offers none.
Once seen clearly, it lost its hold quickly. There was no dramatic release. Just: this is what's needed, and that's what we'll do.
Looking back, this was not a new lesson arriving. It was a familiar one finally landing — absorbed rather than understood. The playfulness, the surprise, the willingness to let each piece become what it needs to be. That had always been the work. I no longer needed to argue with myself or justify- what a sigh of relief.
Stacked
II — The Unachievable Standard
III — Recognition and Release
By the final session, the voice from Chapter II had lost its weight.
What replaced it was not a resolution of the earlier tension so much as a shift in orientation: I was enjoying the painting.
The purples were alive.
The surface was moving.
Two things clarified in the making of this final pass.
First, the distinction between intuition and ego became legible not as a concept but as a felt difference — intuition as clear, clean, quick, quiet; ego as forced, fearful, insufficient.
The one-pass standard had been ego.
The enjoyment of the paint was not.
Second, a quality I had received as criticism for years — the maximalism of the work, its fullness, the fact that it offers no single place to rest — became visible as the thing itself.
Not a tendency to manage.
The gift.
The capacity to harmonize many complicated things, the way the desert harmonizes everything growing up together, wild and coherent at once.
The piece completed as Ribbon Layers of Love.
The working title had been Stacked.
Both are accurate.
From
Compositionally sound, loose in definition. Needing definition in some areas to clarify structure and create depth.
Toward
Additional layers of oil paint, and more leaf, come together to create the rugged desert terrain. The colors of the earth, the red, blues, greens, purples, feel like layers, ribbons.
Turning Point
Allowing paint to help shape the sage bushes and purple accents of playfulness to come through. The patterning of the marbled leaf along with the paint is part of the collaborative beauty of the process.
Integration
Listening back months later, what becomes clear is that this piece could not have arrived so smoothly on its own.
Ribbon Layers of Love has to be seen in the context of Horizon and Ironwood. Seen that way, there is an arc — not a struggle repeated three times, but a single transitional movement across three paintings. Each one asking for a deeper acceptance of a specific signature, a specific way of working. Each one requiring that another invented rule be set down.
What this final chapter resolved was not a compositional problem. It was something older: the question of whether the work itself — maximalist, full, harmonically complex — was enough. Whether it was allowed to be exactly what it is.
The safety, it turned out, was never in the categories or the standards. It was in learning to discern between intuition and fear, and trusting the former completely.
These three seasonal salons were the foundation. The studio investigations are what became possible once that ground was established.
-----------
Closing Reflection
A NOTE ON THIS SERIES
Stacked is the third and final Seasonal Salon.
Horizon took three months and moved through a clear arc of struggle, disorientation, and recovery. Ironwood was shorter, less turbulent, but still carried identifiable points of rupture and reset. Stacked has three chapters because it needed only three. The tension that organized the earlier salons was not absent — it appeared in Chapter II, in a voice carrying an unachievable standard — but it was recognized and released more quickly than before.
The Seasonal Salons were never intended as a format indefinitely continued. They served a specific function: to document a period of active reorientation in the practice, when reflection on the process of making was itself part of the making. That period has completed.
What will follow is a different kind of documentation. The process is no longer organized around the arc of getting lost and finding the way back. It is organized, instead, around listening — one step, then the next, with less interference from the analytical mind between them.
The three salons remain as a record of that transition.
Stacked
III — Recognition and Release
Watch the making of
Stacked
The entire process — from first mark to final surface — distilled into four minutes.
You're part of this
The work doesn't happen in isolation — what you notice becomes part of how it evolves. Tell me what's moving you, what a piece opened up, what you're sitting with. I read every one, and they shape what comes next.