Enter Through the Gift Shop

It's been a long time since I rock 'n' rolled.

Last spring I traveled to Europe with what I can only describe as a backpack full of unfinished business. I had already begun mining art history in my 2004 painting Delft School Blues, but the real weight on my back was a sense of an incomplete education. Coffee table books are sexy, and seminar projections informative, but they are no substitute for presence and aura.

Delft School Blues
2024
watercolor & acrylic on paper
22.5 x 30 inches

Four museums in nine days required a lot of compression in the form of guided tours. Led by local art historians, I learned a tremendous amount—as much as one can pack into a few hours at a time. However, beyond the contemporary scholarship, wall text, and headsets, I increasingly found myself imagining:

What was it like to encounter these paintings when they were new, without all these people, maps, tickets, bookstores, white walls, sentries, and air conditioning?

At the end of the day, through all of it, I clocked a strange sense of transcendence—a transcendence best manifested in a bench facing a painting, like a seat on a vehicle bound for a world long past.

Guided Tour is about that.

GUIDED TOUR. 2026. Watercolor, gouache, acrylic, graphite & ink on paper. 22.5 × 30 inches.

Guido Reni, George Bellows, and René Magritte stop being artists and become stops along a temporal train track. A Baroque painting, Atalanta and Hippomenes, occupies center stage. A figuratively harmonizing Bellows' Stag at Sharkey's appears at the edge. Love, violence, and respite in the same place at different times.

And to cut the drama, an amuse-bouche of Magritte sky—

I think there is nothing quite like staring at the outside world from a window inside a museum. It never seems more expansive to me.

The museum compresses time. It allows the dead to converse with one another. The seventeenth century sits comfortably beside modernism. Surrealism interrupts both. A visitor can move between them in the span of a few steps.

What's in a yellow feather?

Certainly not understanding.

Perhaps a bellwether. Perhaps a disruption.

Intrusive, connecting, but not belonging.

A Deco curved wall and recessed lighting become just another stage for overlapping histories. A container for the experience of masterpieces. Not just seeing them, but seeing beyond them—to imagine their original contexts, audiences, and settings. Before they became destinations. Before they became reproductions. Before they became history.

Improbable?

A guy's gotta try.

A bench, a painting, some time.

Sometimes that's all you need.

If you'd like to talk about it, register for my Philly Crit presentation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Sunday, June 14.

Guided Tour will also be on view in Collective Renderings of We the People at Da Vinci Art Alliance, July 1–19.