Some paintings arrive fully formed. Most of mine do not. They accumulate — over months, over versions, over what I see, what I feel, what I lose. What you see in the final work is only the surface. Beneath it, there are people. There are places. There are conversations I was still having with the dead.
This is the story of how it was made.
This work grew out of the momentum of two earlier journeys — Croatia and Egypt — which rekindled my practice of sketching and plein-air painting:
In the fall of 2025, during those trips, something opened up again in me. I came back and staged my canvases at the beginning of 2026 for a new series. 2025 was also the year of several personal losses — and of a move from Chicago to Lisbon. My eyes and my heart were full. I discovered the treasure of Fernando Pessoa and fell in love with his poetry. And I began soaking into the beauty of old city Graça.
The Street — Where It Began
I lived in Graça, painting in a studio there, walking the same cobblestoned routes every day. The yellow facades, the blue-framed windows, the tiled rooftops, the particular quality of afternoon light on old plaster — all of it was entering me slowly, the way a place does when you stop being a visitor and start just living.
The first version was entirely exterior. A summary of 2025 — the family I lost, the worlds I discovered. Built from my sketches, photographs, postcards collected from the Thieves' Market in Lisbon. The street curved. The sky was wide and blue. I stencilled textures into the walls, layered collaged text from old Portuguese postal documents, wrote "WHY" and "OSa" into the surface the way graffiti does — half declaration, half question.
II
The People Who Arrived
In the version before the final one, the painting was full of people. A man with sunglasses, rendered in cool blue — someone in our close family I lost this year to cancer. A tribute. A memoriam. Someone who occupied space in my life in ways I am still measuring. I placed him there the way grief places people: without asking, without warning, just — present.
Beside him, a blue figure in the Cézanne tradition — a shape holding the weight of other losses, other absences accumulated over three or four years. And in the street: an old woman in a floral dress, walking with a stick, a small child in red on a wheeled toy reaching toward a stone fountain. I had photographed them on a real afternoon in Graça. They appeared around a corner — the very old and the very young, two kinds of time meeting on cobblestone. They became, in the painting, a figure for hope. Or at least for continuation.
I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world. — Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria (Tobacco Shop)
Then I painted over them.
Not because they were wrong. Because they needed to go behind the curtain. Just as the days go back and we try to put grief and moments of joy behind us — these images went under the inner layer of the painting and a new skin started forming. In the final work, the heavy grey wall holds all of that beneath it. The curtain on the left — white, translucent, painted with the same honesty as the iron balcony rail below it — is not decoration. It is a threshold. It marks the boundary between what is shown and what is kept. Between the public painting and the private grief.
III
The Apartment I Left Behind
Then I saw this window. I photographed it in Estoril — a curved building, a blue frame, my own reflection appearing alongside a poster of a face inside the glass. Inside and outside, past and present, the observer and the observed — all collapsed into one surface. That image lodged itself in me. It was exactly what I had been circling.
Pessoa wrote about this. About the self that can only know itself by looking outward. About the window as the precise threshold between the private interior and the indifferent world.
We recently moved to Estoril — a charming neighbourhood with the grace of old Portugal and an oceanside life. Our apartment is on a small inner alley with a lovely Portuguese café where I go for coffee, sometimes a pastry, and to practice my lame Portuguese. The staff is kind, the patrons are extraordinary — a mirror into Portuguese culture, and a gift for an artist who wants to sketch.
But I really missed our first apartment in Lisbon. It was a very small studio, but I had found a small place to start painting there. Before we left and returned the keys — one of the toughest things I do — I drew a quick sketch of it. We made really happy memories. Before leaving I sat with it for a long time. Handing back the keys to an apartment is, for me, a deathlike experience. You create so many memories and leave them all behind.
With this on my mind, I superimposed the studio sketch onto the larger exterior canvas — giving the painting its inside/outside view. The compositional architecture locked into place: the teal sofa, the globe lamp, the balcony window on the left, the wide Graça window on the right, the dark slate wall holding the centre.
The view through the right window is not literal — the terracotta roof, the yellow facade — it is an abstract vision, a memory of the city assembled from everything I had absorbed. What is more than real is the figure in the left window: the red-haired woman, a patron from the café at the end of the alley in Estoril. She wandered into the painting uninvited and refused to leave. She watches, as we all do, from the inside.
IV
The Painting Within the Painting
In the final stage, I added the easel. An unfinished canvas propped in the centre of the room. On it: a figure in pain, screaming — a figure that connects this work to an older body of paintings about duality, about the warm self and the cool self, the eye that sees from the chest rather than the head.
The easel transforms the painting. The room is no longer just a room — it is an artist's room. The empty sofa is now the sofa of someone who has stepped away from the canvas for a moment, or perhaps forever. The unfinished painting within the painting asks: what does it mean to leave something incomplete? What lives in the gap between intention and resolution?
Pessoa's Tabacaria is a poem about the self that watches from a window while life happens in the street below. The Tobacco Shop is across the road — real, specific, ordinary. The speaker is inside. He has grand ideas and no capacity to act on them. He is, in his own words, nothing. And yet — all the dreams of the world. That is the emotional territory of this painting. The interior as the place where we hold everything we cannot say outside.
My paintings evolve. They move through versions. They hold people who have left. The figures that are gone are not gone — they are behind the curtain, in the layers, in the grey wall that seems empty but is not. This is what I mean when I say a painting accumulates. Every version is present in the final one. Every person I placed there and then painted over is still there, breathing under the surface.
Pessoa never published Tabacaria in his lifetime. He kept it in a trunk with thousands of other pages — an entire interior world, unseen. After his death, they found 27,543 documents in that trunk. Letters, poems, unfinished novels, philosophical fragments, heteronyms — other selves he had invented to live inside.
I think about that trunk often. About what it means to make things that accumulate, that layer, that hold the unspeakable beneath the visible. About the curtain as not a concealment but a form of care — for the dead, for the private, for the things that are too large to show directly.
2025 was the year of losses, of movement, of discovery. This painting carries all of it. As does every painting I make that matters.
This painting is still in progress. As are all the ones that matter.
— Satish · Estoril, Lisbon · 2026
