The Spaces Between Moments
What I Was Really Looking For
For a long time, I thought I was photographing moments.
Concerts.
Performances.
Portraits.
Events.
Stories unfolding in real time.
And to some extent, that was true.
Photography is often associated with capturing decisive moments. The image becomes evidence that something happened. A record of a person, a place, or an experience that existed for a brief period of time before disappearing again.
But the longer I worked as a photographer, the more I realized that the moments themselves were not always what interested me most.
I was drawn to what existed around them.
The anticipation before.
The silence after.
The atmosphere surrounding an experience.
The things that happened just outside the frame.
Without realizing it, I had become fascinated by the spaces between moments.
The Moment Before
There is a unique energy that exists before something begins.
A musician waiting to walk on stage.
An audience settling into their seats.
A conversation that has not started yet.
The first light appearing before sunrise.
Nothing has happened.
And yet something is already happening.
The atmosphere carries a kind of possibility.
A tension.
A sense that the world is about to shift in some small way.
I have always been drawn to that feeling.
The moment before often feels more interesting than the event itself because it remains unresolved. It has not yet become a memory. It has not yet become a story.
It still contains every possibility.
The Moment After
The same is true at the other end.
Some experiences become more meaningful after they are over.
The drive home after a concert.
The empty room after everyone leaves.
The feeling that remains when a conversation lingers in your thoughts.
The atmosphere changes.
The energy settles.
Something shifts.
These moments rarely attract attention because they appear ordinary.
Yet they often carry surprising emotional weight.
Perhaps because they create space for reflection.
Space for meaning to emerge.
Space for experience to settle into memory.
Photography Taught Me to Notice
One of the greatest lessons photography ever taught me was how to pay attention.
Not just to the obvious.
To everything else.
To subtle changes in light.
To body language.
To atmosphere.
To relationships between people and places.
The camera became an excuse to slow down.
To observe.
To remain curious.
What I eventually discovered was that many of the things that interested me most could not always be captured directly.
You can photograph a musician.
You cannot photograph anticipation.
You can photograph a crowd.
You cannot photograph the feeling of belonging.
You can photograph a landscape.
You cannot photograph memory.
At least not entirely.
Those realizations stayed with me.
Atmosphere Lives Between Events
Most of life happens between major milestones.
Between departures and arrivals.
Between beginnings and endings.
Between certainty and uncertainty.
Yet those spaces are often overlooked because they do not fit neatly into stories.
They resist documentation.
They resist explanation.
Atmosphere lives there.
So does reflection.
So does curiosity.
Some of the experiences that have influenced me most were not dramatic or extraordinary. They were quiet observations accumulated over time.
A city at dusk.
A stretch of highway.
A backstage hallway.
A hotel window overlooking an unfamiliar neighborhood.
The feeling of being somewhere without fully understanding why it matters.
Those moments continue to stay with me.
Why Abstraction Felt Familiar
Looking back, I think one of the reasons I eventually gravitated toward abstract painting is because abstraction allows room for these kinds of experiences.
Representational images often focus on what happened.
Abstraction allows me to explore what remained afterward.
The feeling.
The atmosphere.
The emotional residue.
The unanswered questions.
Many of my paintings begin without a specific image in mind. They begin with an impression.
A memory.
A sensation.
A feeling attached to a place or experience.
The work develops from there.
The painting becomes less about documenting a moment and more about exploring what exists around it.
The Things We Carry Forward
It is interesting how little of life we actually remember in detail.
Years pass.
Specific events fade.
Names disappear.
Dates become uncertain.
Yet certain feelings remain remarkably intact.
A place can return decades later through a scent, a song, or a particular quality of light.
A conversation can continue influencing you long after the words themselves have been forgotten.
Something remains.
Something survives.
I think much of my work is influenced by that reality.
The paintings are often less concerned with preserving experiences than with understanding why certain experiences continue to matter.
Travel and Transition
Travel has reinforced this idea again and again.
Some of my strongest memories are not tied to destinations.
They are tied to transitions.
Airports.
Train stations.
Roads.
Hotel rooms.
The hours spent moving from one place to another.
There is something fascinating about those environments because they exist between fixed points. They are neither where you were nor where you are going.
They occupy their own territory.
A temporary space.
A transitional space.
A space filled with possibility.
I have always felt comfortable there.
Perhaps because so much creative work exists in a similar state.
The work is never finished.
The next idea is always forming.
You are always moving toward something.
Never fully arriving.
Painting as Exploration
The studio often feels like another version of that in-between space.
A painting begins with uncertainty.
There is no guarantee where it will go.
No map.
No final image waiting to be revealed.
Only curiosity.
One decision leads to another.
One layer creates new possibilities.
The work develops gradually.
I enjoy that process because it mirrors the way life actually unfolds.
We rarely know exactly where we are going.
We move forward.
We pay attention.
We remain open.
We discover things along the way.
The spaces between moments become part of the story.
What Continues to Interest Me
After all these years, I still find myself drawn to the same questions.
Why do certain places stay with us?
Why do certain memories continue resurfacing?
Why do some experiences carry more weight than others?
Why does atmosphere matter?
I do not have definitive answers.
That is probably why I continue painting.
The questions remain interesting.
The spaces between certainty and understanding remain interesting.
The spaces between memory and experience remain interesting.
The spaces between moments remain interesting.
In many ways, that is where my work begins.
Not with what happened.
But with everything surrounding it.
The atmosphere.
The curiosity.
The feeling.
The things that linger long after the moment itself has passed.
That is what I have always been looking for.
And it is still what I am trying to understand.