A New York Detour I Didn’t Expect

I haven’t added to my blog in over a year, but plan on starting up again now. This is my first new blog of the year.

I went to New York for a family health reason.

It wasn’t meant to be a creative trip at all. But I ended up staying longer than planned, and almost without thinking I found myself doing what I always do in big cities… drifting into museums.

What surprised me wasn’t what I saw, but what I didn’t feel.

I realized I was no longer drawn to the famous names. The big iconic painters I’ve admired for decades didn’t pull me in the way they once did.

Instead, I kept lingering in front of work by artists I’d never heard of.
Unknown. Quiet. Experimental.

The kind of pieces that feel like they’re still figuring themselves out.

And that felt oddly comforting.

The paintings on this page are by Grace Rosario Perkins. What I was immediately drawn to when I saw her work was the bright colors and the shapes.

I had never heard of her before. Upon closer look, I fell in love with her variety of collage and what she used for collage. There were some papers, but there was also a ziploc bag with notes in it, small pieces of mirrors, even a silver necklace hanging on one of the paintings.

Seeing these made me think, “What other types of collage pieces could I add to my work that’s not just paper?” It pushed the boundaries of how I thought about collage material.

After so many years of visiting museums, teaching, painting, explaining, refining, I think I’ve started craving the same thing I ask my students to embrace: not mastery, but discovery. Not certainty, but curiosity.

Being out of my normal routine did something subtle but powerful. New streets. New rhythms. New visual language.

It loosened something in me. I started noticing how much my imagination had been running on familiar tracks, even in my own work.

The trip didn’t just give me ideas. It reminded me how important it is to feel a little off-balance.
I’ve always believed growth comes from leaning into what feels slightly uncomfortable. But this trip made that belief personal again. Safe can be pleasant. Safe can be productive. But safe rarely leads to anything truly exciting.

For me in my art, “slightly uncomfortable” means committing to uncomfortable colors, bold colors, because I’ve always gravitated toward neutrals.

It also means adding oversized shapes in large paintings. I feel comfortable with large shapes in small works, but I feel uncomfortable with oversized lines and shapes in large paintings.

As artists, I think we need to keep putting ourselves in situations where we don’t quite know what we’re doing yet. Where we don’t recognize the rules. Where we’re not the expert in the room. That’s where new energy lives. That’s where new work begins.

And maybe that’s why those unknown artists stayed with me longer than the famous ones. They reminded me what it feels like to still be becoming.