Venice

This body of work began as observation. I wasn’t trying to reinterpret Venice. I was trying to notice it — and feel it.

At first I thought I was capturing architecture. Bridges. Water. Facades. Light. But that wasn’t what held me.

It was the narrowness that held something expansive and expressive. The expectations of tight, unassuming alleys opening suddenly into wide campo piazzas and open lagoons.

Within them, entire stages formed by the intricate, still-moving rhythms of time.

The city feels held in place by its own history. Beautiful, but structured. Still, but never completely relaxed. The quiet tension between stillness and movement. Venice feels suspended.

Often I found myself captured by these quiet moments, grateful simply to be there to observe the beauty.

This work isn’t about landmarks. It’s about being inside the spaces between them.

Each painting holds one of those moments — the kind you only notice when you slow down enough to see the city breathe.

This work continues to develop over time.

Gondolas

This one looks louder at first.

The water moves with activity.

The colors shift with time.

The sky refuses to sit still.

Moored gondolas hold the foreground steady,

while everything else seems slightly unsettled.

The water moves, but they don’t.

I remember watching the water and sky more than the boats.

The surface never sits flat.

It reflects and distorts at the same time.

This piece leans more theatrical.

The color pushes forward.

The sky leans into that distortion — not restless, just alive.

The architecture presses upward.

A lone seagull claims the mooring post like it owns the city.

It reads romantic at first glance.

Bright. Vibrant. Open.

But the longer you sit with it, the more deliberate the stillness feels.

The gondolas aren’t drifting.

They’re secured.

Contained by pillars anchored deep in history.

It isn’t about motion.

It’s about what stays in place.

It’s a landscape, but it doesn’t feel distant.

You’re in it.

Meter Maid

Walking through laundry-strung alleys.

Yellow against aged stone.

Looking for what doesn’t exist.

It started as a striking reality.

But it became something else.

Movement with purpose through a place that doesn’t require it.

That tension — between function and irrelevance — felt familiar.

Venice wasn’t built for urgency.

Yet we walk as if there’s something to regulate.

We move with focus.

The city doesn’t argue with us.

It simply continues.

Sometimes structure arrives where no one asked for it.

We keep walking anyway.

Sometimes we carry systems into places that don’t need them.

Sometimes we carry them into ourselves.

But we keep walking anyway.

Alley Cat

A narrow Venetian alley.

A cat mid-pause.

A bicycle leaning against a brick wall.

Darkness that isn’t fully dark.

The kind of moment that almost disappears if you move too quickly.

Nothing is happening.

And yet something is.

The bicycle feels claimed and unclaimed at the same time, balanced against a city that seems suspended in its own time.

The cat doesn’t hurry. It simply witnesses.

The alley doesn’t invite you forward or push you away. It just holds the moment.

It’s a small scene. Calm in its stillness.

I wasn’t painting action. 

I was observing posture — the way objects and animals hold themselves when no one is watching.

The smile comes easily.

The thinking arrives a moment later.

There’s a compression in that space.

A narrowing.

You can feel it closing in, but not threatening.

Just contained.

Venice does that.

It funnels you through history without asking permission.

The cat doesn’t care.

It belongs there.