You should see my house.
Paintings everywhere. Stacked in corners, hung on walls, leaning against baseboards waiting for a decision I haven't made yet. Most of them live upstairs where my office is — which means I work inside them. I look up from whatever I'm doing and there they are. At eight in the morning with coffee. At noon when the light has shifted. At four when everything goes golden. At night when the room is dim and the colors do something completely different than they do in daylight.
I've been living with my own work for long enough now to tell you something I didn't expect:
The paintings keep changing. Not on the canvas — in me, and in the light, and in what I bring to them on any given day. They are not static objects. They are ongoing conversations.
There are paintings I thought I understood the day I finished them.
I was wrong. Not about what I made — about how much of it I could see at once. A painting built in layers can only reveal itself in layers too. You see what you're ready to see. Then life happens, or the light shifts, or you come back to it six months later carrying something different than you were carrying before — and the painting has something new to say.
I have a piece called What Fills the Cracks. Within series. I built it with crackle paste and modeling paste as the foundation — textured, fractured, intentional. Then ink settled into every break. Then acrylics and oil sticks last, magenta and yellow insisting on existing alongside the black.
I loved it immediately. The cracks were the whole point — the way the ink found every fracture the way time finds the places we've been split open. I could stare at the surface for a long time. The texture alone.
Then one day — weeks later, I couldn't tell you exactly when — I looked up at it from my desk and something in the upper left caught me.
A raven.
I hadn't seen it. I had been so focused on what I knew was there — the cracks, the color, the surface I had built deliberately — that I missed what had arrived uninvited. He was just there. Black, unmistakable, completely at home in the upper left corner. I don't know when he showed up. I don't know if he was always there or if I painted him without knowing it. Both possibilities feel true.
I left him there, obviously.
That's what living with your own paintings teaches you: you made more than you know.
The layers you put down in the early stages — the ones that got covered, worked over, partially obscured — they don't disappear. They live underneath. They affect the surface in ways you can feel but not always explain. The painting holds the whole history of itself, even the parts you can't see anymore.
And you find them slowly. A line you forgot you made. A color that's been whispering from underneath the layers and suddenly, on a particular Tuesday afternoon with the light coming in at a certain angle, you hear it.
People ask me sometimes — collectors, people considering a piece — will I still love it in ten years?
It's a real question. A fair one. You're making a commitment, not just a purchase. You want to know that it won't fade into the wall the way things do when they stop having anything to say.
Here's what I tell them, and what living with my own work has made me believe completely:
The paintings that keep giving are the ones that were built with something in them to find. Not a hidden message, not a puzzle — just depth.
Actual layers, literal and otherwise. The kind of surface that changes when the light changes. The kind of work that was made from something real, not assembled to coordinate with a room.
Those paintings don't get quieter over time. They get more fluent.
You learn their language slowly, and then one day you look up from your desk and there's a raven you never noticed, and you understand that you're going to be finding things in this painting for the rest of your life.
My office walls have taught me that a painting is not a finished thing.
It's a presence. It lives in the room with you. It sees you on the hard days and the good ones. It catches different light in January than it does in July. It means something different when you're tired than when you're clear. It holds the moment you bought it and every moment since — layered, the way everything real is layered.
That's what I'm making when I make a painting.
Not an object for a wall. A thing that keeps showing up.
The raven was always there. I just wasn't ready to see him yet.
— Kim