Each summer I head north to Maine, swapping the heat and hustle of Charleston for the cool salt air and quiet rhythm of my wife’s family beach in mid-coast Maine. It's become a ritual for me—a kind of annual reset. I slow down, unplug, and let the natural world remind me why I paint in the first place. There’s something deeply grounding about waking up to the sound of waves, stacking rocks by the shoreline, and spending long days doing what feels like nothing, but turns out to be everything.
This year, like most summers during one of those slow mornings by the sea, I found myself carefully balancing stones into a six-foot-tall stack—part meditation, part architectural challenge, part sculpture. The goal was to make a stack as tall as myself. It wasn’t easy. It didn't just happened on the first, or second or seventh try. But by the end of the morning, that stack had become a kind of monument to the peacefulness I’d rediscovered. Each failed attempt a crashing, rock crunching failure, made me just find better rocks and wait longer for the stones to settle into place. So when I returned to Charleston and stepped back into the studio, I knew exactly what the first painting would be: a towering, life-size portrait of that rock stack. A visual reminder of that quiet, essential pause (I'll share once it is complete).
Inspiration is a funny thing—it doesn’t usually show up when I’m trying to find it. It tends to sneak up in those moments when I’m most present, most human. And while we live in a time where artificial intelligence can generate stunningly beautiful reference images in seconds—landscapes, compositions, even full scenes—they rarely carry the same spark for me. They can be useful tools, sure, but they don't ignite the same passion in the creation process, and I don’t think they form the same emotional bridge between artist and viewer. There’s a missing fingerprint.
That’s why I believe it’s more important than ever, especially for artists, to get out of the studio and into the real world. To stand on the beach, stack the rocks, feel the breeze, and let the world move us. Because when we’re moved—truly moved—the work that follows has the potential to move others too.
