The Way Through

What matters most is how you walk through the fire. – Charles Bukowski

**Periodically I will to share pieces from the past. This is an essay I wrote last year. Enjoy!

On May 21, 2024 I met with my orthopedic surgeon and made the definitive decision to undergo two knee replacement surgeries at the end of the year. I suffered from acute osteoarthritis in both of my knees for many years. It had become more and more debilitating, and my previous treatments were no longer effective. It was a decision I’ll never forget making, because I understood that once I had the surgeries, life as I knew it would change dramatically for months and months. I’d have to stop riding my bike, getting any vigorous exercise, going to the studio, working full time, adventuring with my friends, traveling, even driving a car or going to the grocery store for periods of time. All of that would be replaced with a very slow and simple life, so that I could manage the pain of recovering from such invasive surgeries, and take full advantage of all the things that were going to help my new knees settle into place, become part of my anatomy, and heal as quickly and efficiently as possible: rest, regular walks, physical therapy, and, well, lots of ice. In all, I took three months off from my regular life, and life didn’t return to completely normal for six months.

While I was nervous about what it might feel like mentally, physically and emotionally to trade my usual fast-paced, active life for a slower, more sedentary one for a few months, I also began to look at this time as an opportunity to let my body and mind rest and take a break from the daily demands of running a small business, working with clients, bike training, lifting at the gym, travel, social events, and obligations of all kinds. There is a certain freedom that comes with this kind of hiatus, and if it took having two major surgeries spaced seven weeks apart to get me to take the first long period of respite in my adult life, so be it. I began thinking about all the things I wanted to do that I both typically had little or no time for and that I could do sitting or lying down in the comfort of my home: puzzles (I love puzzles!), watching movies, binging TV shows, writing letters to friends, reading books and, mostly, making art just for the sake of making art.

In preparation for this time at home, I gathered all manner of art supplies from my studio and put them in a large plastic bin: paint, ink, brushes, heaps of colored paper, glue, scissors and a sketchbook. I had no plans for which of the supplies I would use, but I brought them all home just in case. It took three weeks after my first surgery until I could sit at a table comfortably, but on November 19, 2024, I sat down with that sketchbook for the first time and decided in that moment, with no agenda, to start with cutting and gluing paper. I made my first very simple paper collage, and from then on, I never wavered. What followed was a daily practice of cutting and gluing. A brightly colored folio of collages began to take shape.

The word collage comes from the French word coller, which means “to glue” or “to stick together”. The term was first used by artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to describe the technique of gluing materials onto paper. At first, this act of cutting and then gluing shapes to the inside of my sketchbook was just the stimulation my brain needed. I am someone who craves the satisfaction (and endorphin rush) of full start-to-finish experiences, and normally I fill this rush by doing client projects or going on hard, sometimes technically difficult, bike rides.

In place of those things, I began hungering for time in this quickly thickening sketchbook. I didn’t bring home a sketchbook that was appropriate for gluing thick paper, and so it soon became a behemoth compilation of colored bits on paper that buckled from the moisture in the glue. To mark moments in time, I cataloged each page with a date stamp. The ritual also included clean up. I was living mostly in the finished basement of my house in my TV room. I allowed myself to make a mess every day but diligently tidied up after each collage session (mostly so that I did not provoke the ire of my wife who shares this space with me), picking up every tiny shard of cut paper off the carpeted floor and wiping every errant drop of glue off the table. My clean up routine became as much of the daily ritual as the collaging itself.

One day several weeks in, I had a Zoom meeting with my staff. I picked it up the sketchbook and flipped through it to show them what I had been up to. One of the collages — depicting soap, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste caught the eye of Amy, whose job is, among other things, to be my creative partner. “That collage would make an amazing screen print,” she said. Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that the collages in the sketchbook would be anything but, well…collages in a sketchbook. But from that moment on, I began to see them as more, both literally and figuratively.

First, the form that many of the collages took was this new, wonky expression of my visual language. I took delight in seeing that expression develop, and it increased my obsession with making more. Second, I made the collages with no intention for them to be/become anything else. They were art in its purest form! As a working illustrator, it is my job to make work that has a purpose: to adorn, explain, advocate. Even my fine art is made with a certain pressure to please the audience or to sell. A sketchbook is special because its contents simply stay in the book, and they’re not meant to be framed or sold or fussed over. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the ritual became a primary tool for navigating and surviving a dark time when I was otherwise bogged down by intense pain, physical therapy (which I described at the time as “torture”), depression and fatigue. My collages became the way through all of that.

Ultimately, I recognized that the collection of collages I was making was a sort of magic, and I decided I did want to see what new work – work for public consumption – I could create based on their wonky, improvisational, pure form. We did end up turning the collage depicting soap, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste into a screen print. At the time, I was in the beginning stages of planning my next solo show, which was just seven months away. I was spending a lot of time thinking about what this next body of work would be, but I couldn’t seem to settle on a theme. And then I thought, what if I turned some of these collages into paintings? And what if that was my show? Once the idea occurred to me, I couldn’t let it go. And when I returned to the studio in February of 2025, I began to engage in that translation from collage to larger painting. From there my July 2025 solo show The Way Through took shape.

In all, The Way Through contained approximately 40 paintings, each carefully rendered from a different collage in the sketchbook as reference. While there are 82 collages in the sketchbook, only half of them made the cut to painting. Some I attempted to paint but scrapped, because they were better as collages, and others I happily completed, because they were even more striking as a painting. For the most part, I left the weird idiosyncrasies of the collage apparent in the paintings. I was careful to mimic as exactly as I could, the awkward cuts and slivers of negative space between papers — all the evidence of my hand and the lack of precision in my collages.

The sketchbook I used was one I bought in New York in September of 2024, a month or so before my first surgery. The book is emblazoned by the title Mon carnet de croquis poche, which translates to My pocket sketchbook. You’d have to be a literal giant for this sketchbook to fit into your pocket, but, nonetheless, I am tickled by the idea of collages in a pocket-sized sketchbook bursting out and onto walls as paintings. Most of the paintings are larger than the pages in the sketchbook, many much larger, but some are only slightly larger, and a few smaller.

If you are familiar with my work and writing, you might know that I speak often of art as survival. I credit art with saving my life thirty years ago. Art gave my life untold meaning and a means to connection. What I don’t often acknowledge (or maybe I just take for granted) is that art continues to support my survival, not just in the obvious ways, like paying my bills, but in giving me grounding, joy and purpose. What started last November as a simple way to pass fallow time in my basement TV room, ultimately became a way through pain and darkness.

I feel so lucky that I am now on the other side of the healing process for my new knees. At the time I write this, the pain in both my knees is almost gone, and while I still have some stiffness and inflammation (which will eventually go away), I can mostly do all the things I could do before surgery, but better and, ultimately, with less pain. I am back to riding my bike, traveling, working full days and adventuring with my beloveds. As you might expect, I’m also not making collages every day. At first, I felt a sense of loss when I realized the practice didn’t fit into my regular, busy, active life. I kept thinking I “should” make time to continue this practice that had been so meaningful to me. I did make a few more collages after returning to my regular life, but I have since come to see my sketchbook as a beautiful record of this profoundly important and distinct period of my life, and nothing more, and I love it for that. I am so happy that I was able to take this work from this profound period in my life and use it to create something joyful that I can share with others. It has been the perfect ending to this journey.

June 2025

P.S. The Way Through was shown at Chefas Projects in Portland. Several of the pieces are still available for purchase. You can find more information and find contact information for the gallery here.