The Familiar’s Familiar – Original Blurple Painting, 20x20 in

When I moved to Sacramento, I found a studio in the old Panama Pottery factory and stapled eight raw canvases directly to the floor, just to start. This is the first one that made it back up onto stretcher bars. It comes out of my current “blurple” period: one color only, a chromatic world hovering somewhere between midnight and electricity, the color of psychological night rather than literal light.

From that field, two beings co-emerge. A three-eared, furred dog-bunny moves forward, tongue out, as if entirely at ease with the pale, winged rider pressed into its back. The rider is old and newborn at the same time, half-angel, half-larva. Neither figure is an illustration of anything I set out to paint; they appeared as I worked, the way half-remembered dreams insist on a body.

The extra ear listens for what usually stays below hearing: the thrum of wonder, the daftness, the petty / pet-me-ness of being a creature. By “creature” I mean animal, and by “animal” I mean a wildness that has almost forgotten itself, ridden by its own longing, and becoming wild again in the process. Fur becomes skin, tooth becomes tongue; rider and ridden trade places. The thing we hold for safety is also the thing that carries us into danger, and maybe into a different kind of aliveness.

In a time when images are asked to be immediately legible, to explain themselves in a sentence, this painting refuses to settle. It behaves less like an object and more like a presence: it waits, it watches, it keeps rearranging itself each time you return to it. Whatever story lives here isn’t finished in the studio; it’s completed slowly, by the person who chooses to live with it.

Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 20 × 20 in
Year: 2025
Location: Sacramento, California

20x20 inches, blurple acrylic painting: statement piece.