What Is Metaphorical Realism?

Metaphorical realism is a painting rendered like something real, built around an image that could never actually happen, an image that carries the true feeling of a real life. In one of my paintings a turtle crosses the desert with its shell opened like a lid, and underneath it is a whole town, everything it has been carrying the entire way. In another, a Western town grows straight out of a horse, the place and the animal rising from the same ground. Neither scene could happen. Both of them are completely true. That gap, between the impossible picture and the real feeling, is where metaphorical realism lives.

You can love the painting for exactly what you see. Stay with it a moment longer and it starts talking to you about your own life, the things you carry, the places that made you. That second layer is the whole heart of the work, and I paint it this way on purpose.

How it is different from surrealism

This is not surrealism, even though my images bend what is possible. Surrealism makes the strange thing the destination. The clocks melt, a ship grows from a seed, and the point is the dream itself, a way out of the real world. I love that work. Mine goes the other direction. The strange thing in my painting is never the point, it is the vehicle. The town inside the turtle's shell is not a puzzle to solve. It is there because you already know what it is to carry your whole life on your back and keep walking anyway. The image is impossible, the feeling is exact, and you feel it before you ever stop to explain it.

Surrealism invites you to leave the real world for a while. I would rather use one impossible image to help you see the real one you are already standing in, a little more honestly.

Where the second story comes from

My work runs in two lines, and the meaning hides differently in each. The Narrative pieces are the figurative ones, a figure or a scene carrying a feeling, like the paintings in my Sands of Time collection. The Material pieces are the other line, abstract and built by hand from resin, mineral, glass, and real earth I carried back from Sedona, so the place is actually in the surface instead of painted to look like it. Two different doors, one instinct underneath both: I want an object to hold more than its own picture.

Why it matters to the people who live with it

Most people do not choose a painting to fill a wall. They choose the one that says the thing they already believe and had never quite found the words for. That is what this way of painting is built to do. The piece becomes a kind of mirror you keep in the room, and the second story never runs dry, which is why collectors tell me they are still finding new things in a painting years after it went up.

If that is the kind of work you want to live with, come inside. My Collector's Circle sees new pieces first and hears the story behind each one, in my own voice, before it reaches anyone else.