I ask because bricks are one of those ordinary things we stop seeing, even though they are holding up half the visual world around us.

As a scenic artist, that is part of my job — to look around and notice all the little nuances of everyday things in order to make them believable.

I almost want to say, before you read any further, I need you to go outside and walk around your block. I need you to actually look at the surfaces of the houses, or the bricks specifically, if you have any. Notice all the tiny details that make up each and every brick. The things that make them believable as, well, bricks.

One of the things I wish I had started doing a long time ago, when I began my art career, was measuring every single piece of brick I had ever painted. I am pretty sure it would be well over 10,000 feet.

Did you know that most of what you see in movies and television, especially façades in closed areas, is fake? We make it look real.

When I paint brick, I am not painting rectangles. I am painting evidence.

Here’s a great example.

Here is some brick I painted from the theater performance of August Wilson’s Fences.

Here is another image of a police station. I can’t remember what it was for, but it was a television show.

And here is yet another example of brick from a different movie called Sorority Row. The photo on the left is of the real house with a fake facade being built so the house would match the script. The photo on the right was what I had to paint to make it match.

One of my favorite things to do while traveling is take photographs of bricks.

It is amazing to me how many different variations there are. Everywhere you look. Especially in European countries. My whole camera roll is filled with images of bricks.

And when I think about them in the deepest sense, as I zoom in, we make these little squares, surround them with bricks, and then we live inside them. We create our little lives inside our little squares, and they become a reflection of our minds.

Yeah, I’m going deep here.

Bricks are not just bricks. They hold memory for some. They hold meaning for others. They are the façade, the face of what you might see as you travel down a city block. Each one holds a story. Everything you see on it holds a story.

That splash of mud from someone’s shoe when they stepped in a puddle.

That can of Coke that got opened and splattered all over the side of the bricks.

The salt from the trucks as they came through and tried to clear off all the ice in the winter.

The gum from that little boy’s mouth that he carelessly pushed right onto the brick.

They become a canvas for graffiti artists and other artists alike. They become a canvas for kids with chalk and markers and whatever else they can get their hands on.

If you think about it, bricks can also be weapons. We’ve seen it in movies, where somebody gets slammed up against a brick wall and hurts their head.

One of my favorite things about working on movies is that we get to be in places nobody else dares to go, or wants to go.

For instance, I think I have seen every single alley brick within a 30-mile radius of Pittsburgh. I love alleyway bricks. They tell so much more of a story, especially if you are in an alley where there are a bunch of restaurants. You walk back there and look around, and it is crazy what you can find on those bricks. I won’t go into detail here, but next time you are out and about, you should check it out. Walk down an alley or two.

Occasionally, cars crash into them. The UPS truck, with its back door swung open by the wind, smacks into the brick and knocks it out.

Like I said, bricks have a story.

You would be surprised how many different colors are in bricks.

Which is probably why, when I needed to find my way back into painting, I started with bricks.

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That would be the mantra of my life right now.

I don’t know about you, but I have been dealing with a lot of upheaval in ways I didn’t ask for. I have been trying to accept what shows up without immediately wrestling it to the ground like I am an MMA fighter, which is very easy to write about and much harder to practice.

Do you ever feel like every time you turn around, there is something else to handle? Another problem to solve? Another version of your life asking to be adjusted?

For almost a year, I have been in physical and occupational therapy for a work injury that has left me unable to paint the way I used to. My whole career is shifting, and since I appear to be the only official member of the “No Painter Left Behind Act of 2026,” I have decided to stop resisting the truth of what is showing up.

I have to shift.

Maybe I have to pivot.

Maybe I have to let the work change shape before I know exactly what that means.

The real truth is that I don’t know if I will ever paint the way I used to again. Even typing that hurts.

I just got my studio set up. I have been making plans around painting again. I have been trying to insert the positive mindset here. But the reality is more complicated than that. I may need more time. I may need surgery. I may need to stop pretending the old version of my creative life is waiting patiently for me to return to it unchanged.

Oi.

That breaks my heart a little.

Because painting has never just been work for me. It has been how I regulate myself. It has been meditation. It has been survival. It has been the place I go when the world is too loud.

Shift, shift, pivot, pivot.

So this week I sat down and took stock of what I actually have in front of me: the script, the memoir, the painting issues, the assemblages, the five other books I have been slowly working on for years, and the two-terabyte drive filled with photographs from all over the world.

And I decided something.

I don’t need more projects.

I need a clearer center.

So for this season, that center is my memoir and this Substack.

The work I’m building is about finding your way after life knocks you off course. The one thing I feel like I can truly speak about with authority.

It’s about grief, art, survival, memory, love, reinvention, and the strange, stubborn process of becoming yourself again.

And again.

Some of it will become a book. Some of it will live here. Some of it will come through images, studio notes, fragments, and essays. But it all belongs to the same world.

Going forward, I’ll be publishing one essay every Friday.

These pieces may be memoir scenes, reflections, visual notes, companion essays, or fragments from the larger story I’m shaping.

This space is becoming the workshop for the book.

The memoir is the shaped body of work.

Substack is where I let you see it being built.

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Something more polished. More shaped. More “I sat down with coffee and thought deeply about the meaning of things. Again.”

Instead, this week looked like my mother having brain surgery, me trying to stay present for the unknowns around that, and also trying to finish up my paint studio — which, like most things involving paint, dust, boxes, decisions, and emotional attachment, took more out of me than I expected.

So this is not the essay I planned.

It is the essay I actually have.

And maybe that matters more.

There are weeks where life gives you a clean house, a quiet room, and enough emotional bandwidth to make art about what happened.

And then there are weeks where you are inside the happening.

You are answering calls. Carrying things. Waiting for updates. Moving your body through errands and rooms and hospital thoughts. Looking at your unfinished studio and thinking, somehow, this also has to become a place where I can begin again.

That has been this week.

My mother’s surgery has pulled me into the kind of attention that does not announce itself as work, but absolutely is work.

The watching. The listening. The translating of medical language. The trying to understand what is being said, what is not being said, and what needs to be asked next.

In some ways, this has been going on since August 2025. Since then, I have been to more doctors with “neuro” in front of their titles than I can count.

But really, it has been going on since August of 2012, when my mother suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Caregiving has a way of bending time. A day can disappear into one phone call, one appointment, one decision, one worry you keep setting down and picking back up again.

And now, fourteen years later, she is finally having brain surgery.

To say I feel relieved is an understatement.

Relieved because there is finally a procedure, a plan, a possible shift.

Relieved because hope, even when it arrives late, is still hope.

And I am tired.

No, that is not the truth.

I am exhausted.

I am hoping this surgery gives her relief. I am hoping it gives me some too. Maybe not forever. Maybe not for the rest of her life. But maybe for the next ten years.

Maybe enough time to stop living in constant response.

Maybe enough time to breathe.

I’m sharing a little more from the middle of it: the studio, the work injury, the strange act of preparing for a creative life I can’t fully return to yet, and what I am doing to keep from disappearing while I wait (for paid subscribers).

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And I mean everything.

Stained glass. Spray work. Aging. Faux concrete. Sign painting. Vinyls. Wood grainin…

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When I started writing, I was trying to define what it was… poetry, literature, short stories, essays? In the recesses of my mind, I have always wanted to write lyrics for music. Having no real background in writing, it’s hard to find your way. Also, who am I to be a writer anyway?

If you asked my late husband, he described me as a writer disguised as a painter. Hehehe… look how tricky I am. The truth is, I have been writing longer than I have been painting. The truth is, I have volumes of written words. The truth is, I have secretly been writing and submitting work for many years.

I just don’t talk about it.

People know me as a painter. An artist. And those are two of my many loves. What they don’t know is that when I sit down to write, it is literally like I am a musician at the keys. Things just flow from me. And I allow it.

Of course, not everything I write is good. It’s also not all bad. But how would you know unless I shared it?

So… I’m sharing it.

I want to invite you into this part of my work.

On a canvas, I show you how I see the world.

These lyrical essays, built on metaphor, are how I move through it—the moving images my mind creates as I go.

I don’t know about you, but I get lost in moments. Visual ones.

I’m usually in it before I understand it.

Something stands out.
Something feels slightly off.
Something lingers longer than it should.

And I stay with it.

A sunset.
A pebble.
A person.

And then—somewhere in that— something shifts.

Not because it was explained. Because I noticed it.

Not to understand it— but to see what reveals itself when you stop trying to.

Here’s one of those moments.

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This is what I couldn’t see while I was there, and some of the other behind-the-scenes of what…

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And I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that.

The other thing is that when you create illusions for a living, it becomes really hard t…

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And the hardest one to explain.

Because what I’m talking about here— isn’t just love. It’s something quieter. Something deeper. Something that doesn’t …

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Except— it wasn’t really a honeymoon. It wasn’t planned.
It wasn’t polished. And it definitely didn’t go the way I though…

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And then I met Patrick.

In this episode of Cosmic Interference, I’m telling the story of how someone who had fully opted o…

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It started with a photograph.

A bed.

A place I had never been—but …

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But in that quiet, unmistakable way where something shifts—and yo…

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Before I knew what Recalculating was, I was already recording it.

I didn’t sit down and say, “I’m going to make a series.”

I just started telling the story.

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