The Road I Keep Painting

Roads have always been part of my work. Long before I understood anything about composition, I was drawing roads that curved into hills and cut across deserts, just because something about them felt right to draw. That never really went away.

I grew up in Southern California, which means I grew up in a car. I saw most of the world through a windshield before I saw it any other way. Out here, roads aren’t just how you get somewhere — they’re the connective tissue of the whole place, a vast landscape held together by asphalt.

When I got my license at sixteen, roads became freedom. My friends and I would drive around at night with no destination, just to be driving. We’d end up at Denny’s at midnight for no reason. We’d drive out to the old Dutch windmill just to climb to the top and sit there. We explored every inch of that town simply because we finally could. I once ran off with a girlfriend, no plan, and drove until we hit Death Valley. Later, a road took me out of that town for good — to CalArts for art school, then to Los Angeles, into a career and a life I didn’t know yet.

That same road runs the other way too. Back for weddings. Back for Christmas. Back after a bad breakup, when all I wanted was my old bedroom for a weekend. Back when my grandfather died, and again three years later for my grandmother. Back when my parents divorced and we sold the house, and there was no more “home” to drive to — just an exit I used to take.

So when I paint a road, I’m never really painting a road. I’m painting whatever it stood in for — freedom, grief, a beginning, an ending, sometimes all of it at once.

That’s the part worth saying to other artists: a road is never just a road. It’s an easy metaphor for being in-between, and everyone’s spent time in-between — between who they were and who they’re becoming, between a place they left and one they haven’t reached yet. You don’t have to explain that to anyone. You just paint the road, and people bring their own miles to it.

You don’t need a dramatic subject to tell a human story. Sometimes a stretch of pavement disappearing into the dark is doing more work than anything you could invent.