The Original Painting I Don’t Own Anymore

There’s a painting I made years ago that I don’t have anymore. It was one of my favorite landscape pieces, and an old friend bought it from me.

It’s one of those pieces that still feels like mine in a way that’s hard to explain, even though it technically isn’t. Someone else owns it now—and not even someone I’m close with anymore. Life shifted, things changed, and now it exists somewhere else, completely outside of me. I don’t know where it hangs, if it’s tucked away in a closet, if anyone really looks at it, or if the person I fell out of friendship with even still has it.

That’s the strange part about making physical work. You spend hours—sometimes days—completely inside of something, making decisions, adjusting, reworking, getting it exactly where it needs to be. It feels important while you’re in it. It feels like it belongs to you.

And then at some point, it leaves.

Most of the time, that’s a good thing. That’s the whole point. The work goes out into the world and becomes part of someone else’s life. But every now and then, there’s a piece you think about later and realize you have no connection to anymore except the memory of making it.

This one comes back to me every so often. I’ll think about the colors or the way it felt when it was finished, and then I remember I don’t have access to it at all. It’s just gone from my world. I didn’t even take high-resolution photos of it—it’s sitting on my hard drive as a jpeg, slowly degrading year after year.

It’s a strange feeling, especially knowing the person who has it is no longer someone I would ever choose to be in a room with again. Once the work leaves your hands, you don’t get to control where it goes or who it stays with. It doesn’t follow your life. It follows its own path.

That’s part of what’s made me care more about documentation and prints. A way to hold onto something that would otherwise disappear from my own archive.

Sometimes the only version of a piece you still have… is the one you made before it left.

Maybe the art is in the way it exists now—like an old friendship, slowly fading, eventually becoming something you can’t quite access anymore.

CYLINDROPUTINA ON THE MESA 2020