My commission process is a practice in listening and companionship. From the outset we acknowledge that the artwork will hold multiple purposes. These paintings mark milestones. They are evidence and witness of significant changes. They celebrate new chapters. They honor grief.

These works are a way to hold onto meaning in moments when meaning feels elusive; those times when you’ve left what was familiar by choice or circumstance, still settling into what’s new. My commissions are a chance to be a companion: to see you, be with you, and bless the in-between.

When we begin, I meet with my collectors to explore the contours of their lives. In our listening session, we explore the questions they are holding. We recall important stories and memories. We name new desires, or new intentions if what we want still feels unknown.

During this time, I gather as many imaginative handholds as possible. Just like an actor preparing for a role, I collect sensory inputs to build a world with my collectors. We make lists of music that makes their heart sing, or poems that feel deeply true. We consider colors that evoke the mood and desires of this moment in their life. All of these fragments create a kind of living collage. I become a student of their inner world, not to analyze but to inhabit.

For this commission, we gathered music, soundtracks, and poems. We spoke of frustrations and losses that sharpened over time. New griefs emerged. Old ones came into focus. We circled around these questions:

What changes when a long-awaited dream becomes everyday life?
How does a chosen home shape how we live in the world?
What kind of life do I want to lead—and how will my home reflect that?

We created space for these questions, gently turning them over in our hearts. We considered the rhythms of their household and grounding spiritual practices. Practices of morning and evening prayer had become steady anchors, and one phrase had struck their hearts: “as our eyes behold the vesper light.” For some reason, these words felt sacred, weighty, and true. They commanded imagination and attention, even if we couldn’t quite understand why.

That gesture—turning to behold vesper light—became central. It became the name of the painting: Vesper Light.

Vesper Light is the quality of light at the easing of the day, the light of thresholds. It is not the bold clarity of the afternoon sun, nor the obscurity of night. It’s a light that casts both past and future in luminosity. It’s the light that warms us, prepares us, nurtures us.

Our imaginations turned toward the first light we experience in the womb. This infancy light, suffusing our early field of vision with warm oranges and reds. Opening our eyes to behold this quality of light is a movement of return and expectation. To what do we return, and what new sets of expectations do we carry there?

After our initial session, my first meditative movement was to create their new canvas by hand. Working during the golden-hour-vesper light, I listened to the soundscape we curated. In slow, meditative motions I let the songs, poems, and prayers spread out in the studio atmosphere. They created a sacred space for working and deep, intuitive listening. This set the intention for the whole process, inhabiting a shared space of love where the threads of connection would become clear.

The first layers were washes of yellow, ochre, and orange—building a base of luminosity. Continuing to work in vesper light, I allowed the late Spring sun to inform the composition visually and energetically. I worked closely with the canvas, smudging, erasing, marking. Each motion a trace of presence, intention, and longing. Through the slow build of layers, shapes and symbols began to reveal themselves. All the while, the phrase “our eyes turn and behold the vesper light” rang through my heart. This phrase became my meditation. I continued to live the questions: “

What is it about this light that is comforting?
What does it allow that daytime does not?
How does it prompt release and welcome?

To my heart, they held qualities of love and meaning, though I could not yet name why. Those would become apparent once my collectors and I viewed the painting together in person.

This poem was one of the artifacts from our first listening session. I read it once, but did not return to it until after the painting was complete. As I return to it now, I see that it made a deep home in my subconscious. The poem and the painting became paired as dialogue partners. They serve one another in illumination, not illustration.

In light of the poem, the painting began to feel deeply biological. Not clinical and objective, but visceral and immediate. Some of the figures evoke full, working breasts—those that have already taken on the labor of feeding. The composition, deeply physical, holds a strong hope inside the flesh, blood, and bone of living and dying.

In the midst of many soft gestures, one central symbol emerged. I didn’t place it there intentionally. It arrived. It felt right, necessary. It surprised me, because I don’t usually have one central figure at the center of my compositions. Perhaps I’m afraid to claim the center, but this one demanded presence. Other shapes and textures stay subtle and obscured. This symbol stood alone, strong and steady.

From that center, the painting feels like it stretches out in all directions, like it’s reaching toward some expanse beyond language. It is a landscape evocative of both an inner reality and outward beholding. It fuses the horizons together.

*Unwrapping Vesper Light in its new home*

I was surprised by the emotional response the painting evoked in my collectors. The first word for their first feeling was safety. It was an honest, instinctive reaction. And then the next impulse was to scan the painting for signs of sincerity. We want safety and we feel it quickly, but there is an impulse to test. We poke and prod to make sure this safety is reliable, that it can hold.

This response is beautiful to me. It’s a rich insight into the ways that our body trusts beauty. Our hearts can leap in recognition while our minds strain to make sense of what we already know. My hope is that this painting becomes an exercise in integration, of learning to trust our heart’s instinct.

Vesper Light now hangs in their home. It lives in the space we imagined together holding stories and silence, memories and questions. It is a visual companion they can return to again and again, gathering meaning and beauty as it accompanies them along the way.

If you would like to learn more about my commission process, please visit my commission page.

Vesper Light

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