"Night Wave" Painting

I never planned to be a painter. I found a box of canvases in my mother’s basement, and everything changed.
I grew up in Bethel, North Carolina — a small, tight-knit mountain community where I spent my childhood and most of my life hiking, fishing, mountain biking, and living as deeply as I could inside these mountains. The landscape of Western North Carolina is not a backdrop for me. It is home in the most fundamental sense — I know its light, its seasons, its moods, the way you know a person you have loved your whole life.

I had always felt that I could be an artist deep down but never had the confidence to act on it. That changed a couple of years ago when I moved into my mother’s house and discovered — tucked away in her basement storage room — nearly a hundred small canvases that my stepfather had bought years earlier, hoping someone in the family would put them to use. I bought the cheapest acrylics and brushes I could find, sat down, and started messing around. That was it — I was hooked. I found the process so therapeutic, I couldn’t stop.

For the first year I painted small, experimented constantly, and gave almost everything away — fifteen or twenty pieces to friends, colleagues, anyone who expressed interest. There is a particular joy in knowing that something you created can be handed to another person, transferring whatever feeling you put into it, or creating an emotion entirely new to the viewer. This is in part, why I paint.

The shift to serious work came when the owner of the company where I work as an IT and security operations specialist asked me to create larger pieces for the walls of our newly remodeled corporate office. He invested in professional supplies and gave me the grace and time to work while the renovation was taking place. Between December 2025 and February 2026, I painted sixteen works (some large-scale) that now constitute my portfolio, all of them created while holding down a full-time career. I became completely immersed in the art. These currently hang in the halls of our office, my first public exhibition.

My work is fundamentally about emotion and light — the way it transforms everything it touches. The blue-grey quiet of mountain fog at dawn. The copper warmth of a forest at golden hour. The brilliance of a sunset pressing through storm clouds. The stillness of moonlight finding its way across open water. These are not subjects. They are emotional states. I use landscape as the language to describe them.