A former classmate, Doug Meehan, has a remarkable eye for photography. One of his photographs of a bamboo forest in Kyoto stayed with me long after I first saw it—not because I wanted to recreate the scene, but because I couldn’t stop thinking about the texture.
Rather than copying the photograph, I picked up a palette knife and began building layers of paint. As the texture grew, the painting gradually became something entirely its own.
What began as inspiration from nature evolved into an exploration of depth, movement, and light. The palette knife allowed me to carve, spread, and reveal each layer, creating a surface that changes with every shift in light.
Sometimes inspiration begins with someone else’s image and ends somewhere entirely unexpected.