Original available: $300
“Be Softer”
20” x 20” Acrylic
Gallery profile (1.5” depth) gallery wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of print or original.
Beneath the Surface
“Be Softer” has two different - but very connected - meanings.
The first is this: this piece feels to me like being gentle with myself. Being kind, being soft with myself. Like grabbing a mason jar from my kitchen cupboard and filling it with living beauty, just because I want to. Because yes, I can give myself small gifts like this. Gathering and curating beauty around me has nothing to do with deserving or not deserving it - we don’t earn softness with our performance. It has to do with the simple fact that we were created to live fully alive, leaning into life and beauty - including that which we can see with our eyes when we bring elements of nature into our home. This is beauty that softens our surroundings - and in so doing - if we let it - softens our insides.
Here’s the second piece of it: life throws so much loss and grief at us, right? Betrayals, crushed hopes, unmet longings, plot twists we never expected or desired - things that, if we’re not intentional in our internal responses, can begin to harden us inside. Can cause our hearts to close off toward hope; can, almost without our awareness, train us to perpetually expect the worst from life. It’s so easy - and sometimes feels like it’d hurt less - to stop looking for goodness and beauty. Life’s brutality is less shocking when you’re expecting it, right?
Through all my losses - and I’ve experienced many - I’ve learned that if I can persist in living wholeheartedly - keep playing and loving hard, stay awake toward beauty, keep myself open to the small gifts - I can continue to cultivate a heart that’s soft. I can give life and love and people the benefit of the doubt. I can laugh with my head thrown back and enjoy people and nature and music and art and God with all that I am. I can receive all of God’s extravagance and gratefully bask in it.
If life has thrown losses your way and you resonate with this desire to soften even more in the face of circumstances that would try to harden you and shut you down… this painting is my prayer for you. May you stay tender. May you be softer.
Original Available: $200
Floating
10” x 30” Acrylic
Standard Profile (3/4” depth) gallery wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
Floating was one of my first pieces this year that truly came with ease, with flow. It felt like a complete gift from God, almost like I found it or stumbled into it by accident. If you’re tired of life feeling like the hardest work, if you’re desperate for things to come easily for a change, desperate to find your own version of flow… this piece is a prayer for you.
Original Available: $225
“Breaking Through”
12” x 24” Acrylic
Gallery Profile (1.5” depth) gallery wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
Breaking Through.
Think: tiny flower pushing up through a sidewalk; blooms breaking through a barrier, overcoming resistance and defeat to emerge, to boldly unfold, to grow unhindered, strong, beautiful.
Think unabashedly thriving, where, in theory, nothing should be able to live.
If this resonates with you, it’s my prayer for you.
Original available: $250
“Emerging”
Wayfinding Collection I
20” x 30” Acrylic
Standard profile (3/4” depth) gallery-wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
I came out in early 2024 (in phases, and more publicly toward the end of the year). Though I may have demonstrated courage, it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done, on lots and lots of levels. And in the wake of it (all the loss, the uncertainty, the exposure and exhaustion of putting myself “out there” in a way I never dreamed I’d have to), I’ve gone largely into hiding. I haven’t disappeared entirely - I’ve re-emerged here and there to use my privilege and voice online to raise awareness of the current injustices in our country, and in my offline life, I’ve poked my head out from underground occasionally to lead worship for my church fam. But I haven’t shared myself as freely as I used to. Not by a long shot, not online or off.
Throughout 2026, I’ve felt God preparing me to share myself more intentionally and vulnerably again. So it seems fitting that piece I of this collection is titled “Emergence.” In this piece, the fragile calla lilies emerge from darkness, showing up on the scene with a bit of flare. With paint spatters. With courage and confidence and energy.
This piece is for you if, like me, you need some encouragement to emerge, or re-emerge, into your life. To show up fully, with all your natural flare. Leaves spread wide, with no shame or hiding, and with a little bit of paint flying. With your whole, entire heart. As your whole, entire self.
Original available: $250
“Opening”
Wayfinding Collection II
24” x 24” Acrylic
Standard Profile (3/4” depth) gallery wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
Like flowers to the sun, part of finding our way is often learning to open (or re-open) ourselves. It can be terrifying, especially when we’ve been hurt, or when we’ve gone unseen by others for a long time.
If I’m honest, I’m currently re-learning how to live openly after a couple of years of feeling largely afraid to. The loss of a number of places in my life where I could formerly be wholly (or at least mostly) myself has made me a little timid, unsure. My fiancee Kim has been a steadfast force of warmth and sunlight in my life, though, and God is using her to give me courage, to invite me to live openly again, in whatever ways I can.
If your desire is to learn, or learn again, to live with heart open, to show up fully in your life as your whole wide self… this is for you.
Original available: $325
“Falling”
{A diptych}
Wayfinding Collection III
Two 10” x 30” Canvases
Standard profile (3/4” depth) gallery wrapped canvases
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of print or original.
Beneath the Surface
Have you ever had to let go of portraying an image you felt others wanted (or needed) to see when they looked at you you, let go of burning yourself out trying to hold everything together and finally just allowed things to be as they actually are? These Divine invitations to lay down our performance and pretense can be some of the most painful to accept, but whenever we gather our courage, allow the things we can’t sustain anymore to crumble, and venture deeper into authenticity, there are profound rest, peace, and freedom to be found there.
"Falling" speaks to the courage required to allow false images of perfection to fall away, to let all the pieces land where they may. It speaks to the beauty that is found in embracing what's real, rather than clinging to an image or a mask.
This diptych piece is for you who want to remember how much beauty can emerge at the moment when things seem to fall apart… if we have eyes to look for it.
Original available: $275
“Surrendering”
Wayfinding Collection IV
12” x 24” Acrylic
Gallery Profile (1.5” depth) gallery wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
“Surrendering” depicts milkweed seed pods in late summer, autumn approaching. Milkweed grows abundantly here in the hill country of Colorado, and I’ve always been so drawn to it. There’s something about the dying-yet-wide-open look of it, the way it blooms, then goes to seed, and then… lets go.
Our journeys of becoming require this of us every so often: we “bloom,” and then let go… In this going dormant, this season where maybe we’re less obviously productive, where the beauty or impact of who we are is less visible to most, less “at the surface” - the process goes underground, but it’s no less real.
It takes a unique eye to see the beauty in dying milkweed, just as it takes a unique soul - sometimes our own, sometimes another’s - to see or sense the beauty in our process when the growth is mostly occurring in hidden places inside us. God’s hand is still shaping us, even in the dark. Our formation hasn’t stopped. We can trust the process (both in ourselves and in others) even when it’s harder to see it, because the One who designed this cycle is trustworthy.
This piece is for you who need a reminder that even when your growth and beauty are less outwardly apparent, they are real, deep, and true.
Leaning In
Wayfinding Collection VI
20” x 24” Acrylic
Standard Profile (3/4” depth) Gallery Wrapped Canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
As I’ve moved through various seasons of change throughout my life, I’ve frequently encountered overt resistance from those who may genuinely care for me at some level, but who, for whatever reason, lack an imagination or vision to see the surrender, the journey, the nuance and substance beneath the surface of my visible choices. Most recently, this has been true of my coming out journey.
I think, as people who seek to cultivate an authentic and deep inner life, most of us have to experience occasional seasons of being challenged and invited to stand firmly in our transformation, face to the wind, fiercely trusting God’s hand in our formation process. Learning to lean into our continued becoming regardless of the voices and volume of those who incorrectly feel the need to impose their opinions and desires onto our process. Our invitation is to eventually learn to give ear only to a precise handful of voices - those who’re capable of holding space for the uncertainty of our becoming - and to cultivate an internal posture of quietness and trust while we steadfastly lean into the wind.
If you resonate with this invitation to stand firm and lean into your becoming despite the loud winds of resistance, this piece is my prayer for you.
from $45.00
Original available: $275
“Rising”
Wayfinding Collection VI
20” x 30” Acrylic
Standard profile (3/4” depth) gallery-wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
Chronologically the final painting of the Wayfinding Collection, “Rising” in some ways represents the journey’s final segment. Finding my wings - discovering my abilities & my competency to be greater than I’d expected, being able to look back over my last couple of years’ path and see so much of my becoming - is allowing me to rise like the proverbial phoenix. To be lifted out from under the heaviness of people’s rejection and opinions, to become a truer, lighter, freer version of who I was created to be.
The reality, though, is that our journeys are never strictly linear, and to think of them as such can cause us to miss out on experiencing and growing through some of the most important, most transformative seasons of our lives.
Which is to say: we never arrive at an end point - the destination and the journey are always one and the same. And after every “rising” will inevitably come new seasons of falling, surrendering, etc. If we are committed to continually becoming, we’ll never stop cycling through all these (and more) pieces of the process. And while parts of our cycle may feel repetitive (“Did I not learn this lesson well enough the first 3 times through?!”) we are actually being drawn in deeper, further, higher, truer each time around. If we are awake and intentional at all, we never stop becoming more and more fully ourselves.
If you resonate with this desire to rise, to shake off shame and live into a fuller, freer, more authentic version of your self, this piece is for you.
Original Available: $225
Here
Wayfinding Collection VII (Conclusion of Collection)
10” x 30” Acrylic
Standard Profile (3/4” depth) gallery wrapped canvas
Finish: Professional satin varnish
Prints available (see below)
“Beneath the Surface” card included with purchase of original or print.
Beneath the Surface
The sound track to the creation of this piece was the song, “Where I Found Myself,” by August Green. I stumbled upon August on Spotify a while back and I fell so in love with this song that I couldn’t resist writing some of the lyrics into this piece. Here are those lyrics, not necessarily in the order they fall in within the song:
No more runnin’ from the feeling; no more hiding in my head
Everything I thought I needed led me here instead…
Every piece that I let go brought me back to who I know
Right here, I found myself again.
This song - and this painting - marked a reorientation moment for me. Sometimes life - its demands and requirements, its opinionated voices - grows too loud, pulls me too far off-center, and I need something to give me pause, to help me find my way back toward living before God alone. This song did that for me, and gave me language for some of my process.
For me, the last couple of years have been so much about loosening my tight grasp on whatever image I think I need to perform or portray, for whomever I tend to (wrongly) think needs that falseness from me. It’s been about shedding another layer - or two, or twelve - of pretension and coming home in a new way to my honest self, and to God. About offering my naked life back to God as an act of worship… saying, “Here I am, just me, living for no one’s approval but yours, being as true as I know how to who I believe you made me to be, and trusting you with all the implications thereof.”
I’m learning that when I’m pulled off-center, the place I ache to come home to is not far off or difficult to attain - it’s actually right here, already inside me. It’s living into the truth of how I’m made, before the One who made me.
This piece is for those who’re longing to press deeper into that homecoming. Just you. Honestly being who you are, living the way you were made to live. Right here.
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