Skipper – The Language of Line and Shape

Every painting I make starts the same way, not with a subject, but with a shape.

Before there's a face, there's a triangle. Before there's a figure, there's a circle leaning into a rectangle. I've been working in this visual language for a long time now, and Skipper might be the painting that says it most clearly.

Who Is Skipper?

Skipper is a 16×20-inch portrait, but calling it a portrait feels almost too simple. The face is built from fragments: a blue quadrilateral for one eye, a set of concentric circles for the other, a sharp triangle where a nose might be, arcs and wedges filling in the rest.

It's a figure you feel like you recognize, because the shapes do the recognizing for you.

The name carries its own weight too. In English football, the skipper is the captain: the one who leads from the front, who sets the tone, who the team looks to when the moment matters. There's something about that word I've always connected with. Not in an ego sense, but in a sense of ownership and responsibility. To be a skipper is to know where you're going and to bring others with you.

That's how I see myself as an artist. I'm part of a new wave of independent creators who build and grow their practices on their own terms. No gatekeepers. No waiting for permission. We control the work, the vision, the direction. We are the captains of our own careers, and we're charting a course that didn't exist before we started out.

Skipper is a self-portrait in that sense. Not of my face, or of anyone in particular, but of that identity, and of whoever connects with it.

The Visual Language I Work In

Before I ever picked up a brush, I studied English. In my first attempt at a bachelor's degree, I was deep in language: the structure of it, the rhythm of it, the way words could be stretched and bent and stacked to mean something entirely new. I grew up admiring hip hop artists for exactly that reason. The way they manipulated the English language to paint vivid pictures of any subject: life, love, struggle, joy, identity. That felt like the highest form of craft I'd ever witnessed.

That love of language never left me. It just changed form when I moved to art school.

Now I see lines as words. Shapes as sentences. A single line has weight and direction. It says something on its own, the way a well-placed word can stop you mid-thought. But it's when you start combining them that something bigger happens. A series of words creates a sentence. A series of sentences creates a story. And a series of shapes, triangles and circles and arcs and rectangles all jostling together in a composition, creates something you feel before you fully understand it.

That's the jumbled, layered world I'm building every time I paint. It's not chaos. It's syntax.

With Skipper, I wanted that energy to feel grounded but alive. The jersey anchors it in something cultural and everyday. The fragmented face lifts it somewhere else. That tension between the familiar and the abstract is exactly where I want to live as a painter.

Why Shapes?

I started my art career as a photographer. For years, my eye was trained to see the world as it already existed: to frame it, capture it, preserve it. Photography taught me how to read light, shadow, composition, the weight of a moment.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't want to copy the world anymore. Photography already does that better than I ever could. Painting, I discovered, could do something photographs can't: it can show you how something feels to look at, not just what it looks like.

That's when shapes became my language. They don't pretend to be more than they are. A circle is a circle. And yet, put two circles where eyes should be, and suddenly there's a soul looking back at you. That's the part that still surprises me every time.

Skipper is available as a 16×20-inch original. If it speaks to you, it's yours.

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