Description
“Surging” is a unique commission piece that allowed me to dive into a completely different kind of high-stakes landscape. One of my collectors, an orthopedic surgeon, asked me to paint him at work in the operating room. Using his likeness as the anchor on the right side of the canvas, I completely improvised everything around him to build a complex, surreal, narrative world.
Fresh off my trip from Italy, the architecture of my travels heavily bled into the composition. Instead of a sterile hospital, I imagined this intense procedure taking place deep within a subterranean basement corridor, where a dizzying, labyrinth-like staircase climbs into a heavy darkness. The details are a peek straight into my mind at the time: the graffiti scrawled on the back wall is drawn directly from an actual character from a Star Wars street art piece I saw in Italy, and the wolf mask in the foreground came from a period where I was completely obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood (the same year, I even dressed up as the Big Bad Wolf walking the streets of Vegas for Halloween!).
When I first showed him the finished piece, I offered him my usual policy—if a client wants to decline a commission, they absolutely can. At the time, his excuse was that he had small children in the house, which made total sense given the heavy, surreal mood of the canvas. So, I held onto it for many years and over time, the painting truly grew on me. Years later, after his children were grown up, he came back wanting to finally purchase it. By then, the value had tripled! We had a wonderful laugh about it, but it stands as a beautiful reminder of how a piece of art can wait patiently for its perfect moment.
In my children’s book, this canvas is the scariest page in the entire story. It captures the terrifying moment when the characters suddenly come upon a wild wolf pack—leaving them completely stricken with fright, frozen in place, and scared to death as they try to figure out what to do.