You don't always know why a piece moves you. Recognition arrives before the language for it does.
There is a particular kind of message I receive about my work, and I have been thinking about it all week.
It usually starts something like this: "I don't know why, but I keep coming back to this one." Or: "This piece feels like something I lost when I was young, but I can't say what." Or: "My mother would have loved this."
None of these messages are about the painting itself. They are about something the painting is holding for the person looking at it.
I used to be confused by this. I thought, surely the piece is about what it is — the colours, the shapes, the choices I made in the studio. How can it be about something that has nothing to do with me?
Now I understand. The painting is one half of a conversation. The other half is whatever the person looking at it brings.
The first time someone feels a piece
There is a moment that happens, sometimes, when a woman first sees a piece she will end up living with. It is not a decision. It is a recognition.
Her face changes for a second. She does not always know that it changed. She might say, "Oh," quietly, or she might just stop talking mid-sentence. And then, often, she'll move on, scroll past, close the tab, return to whatever she was doing. But the piece has already arrived somewhere in her she does not have a name for.
She will come back to it. She might come back to it in three days, or three months. The recognition does not go away. It just waits.
Why recognition isn't about the literal subject
My paintings are not literal. They do not depict mothers, kitchens, children, weddings, hospital rooms, the colour of the sky on the day someone you loved was born. And yet the women who collect them often write to me about exactly those things.
This used to puzzle me. It does not anymore.
What we recognise in art is rarely the subject. It is the texture of a feeling. A particular shade of green that sits the way a particular hour sat in your childhood. The way two colours meet, the way two people once met. A softness that holds the shape of someone you still miss.
This is why a piece can feel personal when, by every literal measure, it is not.
The Mother's Day connection — what we recognise from the women who shaped us
Today is Mother's Day. I am thinking about all the women whose presence we feel without trying to. The ones who taught us how to hold things gently — and how to let some things go.
Some of the women reading this will have lost their mothers. Some will be mothers themselves. Some will have complicated relationships, the kind that do not fit neatly into a card. Some will be carrying a mother-shaped absence they have not named.
What I have noticed, over the years, is that the women who collect quiet, soft work often do so because the work resembles a feeling they associate with the women who shaped them. Not always literally. Sometimes it is the colour of a kitchen at dusk. Sometimes it is the way a softness can be strong. Sometimes it is the way a piece, like a person, knows when to be quiet.
The art is not the mother. But it can hold the same kind of feeling — and that is sometimes the closest we can get.
How the women who collect my work describe it
"It feels like home."
"It feels like the version of me I was before I started carrying so much."
"It feels like something I lost."
"It feels like a hand on my shoulder."
None of these are about the painting. All of them are about recognition. The piece is doing the same work for them that a small useful object would do — letting them keep something otherwise unkeepable.
Closing
You don't need a story behind a piece for it to mean something to you. The story is whatever you bring to it.
If a piece in the collection has been quietly staying with you, today is a soft day to look at it again. There is no urgency. The work waits the way the women who shaped us waited — quietly, without rushing.
The collection is here, whenever you'd like to look more closely.