Why I Keep Returning to the Horizon

I didn’t set out to paint horizons.

But when I look across my work, I realize how often something resembling a horizon appears—a distant line, an opening, a place where one space gives way to another. Sometimes it is obvious. Other times it is barely there, partially obscured by mist, movement, or layers of paint.

I find that interesting because I rarely begin a painting with a specific scene in mind. I work much more intuitively, responding to color, movement, light, and what is happening on the surface. And yet, again and again, I seem to create a place in the distance.

In Mist, the horizon is elusive. It seems to exist somewhere between air and water, visible but not entirely reachable. In Threshold, it feels more like a destination—a place beyond the movement in the foreground. In Clearing Light, the eye is drawn past the turbulence toward something brighter and farther away. And in First Light, distance and light work together to create a sense that something is beginning.

Only after living with these paintings did I begin to recognize the pattern.

Perhaps I return to the horizon because it holds two things at once. It is a boundary, but it is also an invitation. We can see where we are, while imagining what might exist beyond what we can clearly make out.

That tension feels familiar to me.

Much of my work has been created during a period of change, when I have been learning to become comfortable with uncertainty rather than needing to know exactly what comes next. Looking back, I wonder whether these distant openings have been appearing in my paintings before I fully understood why.

I don't want to define what they mean too precisely. One of the things I value about abstraction is the room it leaves for someone else to enter the painting with their own memories and associations.

Maybe you see a shoreline.

Maybe you see sky.

Maybe you see a place you remember.

Or perhaps you simply see somewhere beyond where you are standing now.

That may be what keeps bringing me back to the horizon. It doesn't tell us what is waiting on the other side.

It simply reminds us that there is another side.