The Studio, The Lens, and the Moments I Didn’t Capture
I’ve spent most of my life building in borrowed spaces.
On film sets that disappear when production wraps. In apartments where the light shifts every year. In temporary corners carved out between deadlines and responsibilities. I’ve painted entire worlds that were dismantled overnight. I’ve supervised crews, solved problems at impossible speeds, and watched months of work vanish into trucks. And dumpsters.
And I loved it.
But something changes when the space is yours.
Recently, I worked very hard to secure a studio. Not metaphorical. Not aspirational. A real room. Four walls. Light that moves across the floor. Paint where it falls. Silence when I need it.
It feels different than I expected.
Quieter. Heavier. Earned.
For years, Skewed North was a philosophy — the idea that being off-course wasn’t failure, just a different orientation. Now it has walls. Now it has a physical anchor.
And with that comes a deeper responsibility to the work.
The studio isn’t just where I’ll make paintings. It’s where I’ll refine perception. Where I’ll question what it means to capture something. Where I’ll explore the tension between control and surrender.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned as an artist, it’s this: not everything is meant to be captured.
Some things are meant to be witnessed.
That lesson didn’t come in a classroom or a gallery. It came through a lens.
When I first started doing photography, I didn’t think much of it. I had booked a flight to New Zealand and Australia and needed a camera, so I bought a small Canon PowerShot and went. It wasn’t ambition. It was practicality.
But somewhere on that trip, something shifted.
Photography gave me faster results than painting. I didn’t need to stretch canvas or wait for layers to dry. I just had to look. And when I started using a macro lens, everything changed. You don’t understand how complex a flower is until you crawl inside it with glass. Layers on layers. Colors nested within colors. What looks simple from afar becomes architectural up close. It expanded my thinking. It made the ordinary feel deliberate.
Over time, my photography evolved. At first, I shot to remember where I had been. Then I shot to capture the moment as it was. Eventually, I began to see the world only through the lens. I was present for the shot, not for the moment.
One day in Hawaii, I forgot my camera.
Of course that was the day a whale breached at sunset.
It was enormous and sudden and perfect.
And I missed the shot.
I stood there, hands empty, watching something I couldn’t freeze, couldn’t frame, couldn’t replay. Just sky, ocean, and that massive body suspended in air before disappearing back into the water.
It was beautiful.
And it was gone.
I thought about that whale for months.
Inside the Studio
Then it happened again in the Badlands…