When My Paintings Met Greece

My paintings recognized something before I did.

Claim It For Yourself and Uncovering Yourself, 2024

Something strange happened when I looked at two of my paintings from last year — Uncovering Yourself and Claim It For Yourself.

I painted the pair not too long after returning from France, gathering impressions from Paris and the French Riviera and then living with those memories until they slowly took shape on the canvas. At the time, they felt right.

I even wrote about both paintings when they were new. I linked them to France, to color, to texture, to atmosphere — to what I believed they were about and why I had created them.

But they weren’t finished speaking to me.

Oia, Santorini — familiar beyond the photographs.

A little over a year after finishing those two paintings, I traveled to Greece. It wasn’t until I returned home and sat with the paintings again that something shifted. They no longer felt like France. They started to look like Greece — as if I’d painted it ahead of time.

Even the titles began to read differently. Uncovering Yourself. Claim It For Yourself. They felt less like reflections of who I had been when I painted them, and more like suggestions of who I was becoming.

Skaros Rock from Firostefani — whitewashed geometry against sea and sky.

I’d always wanted to visit Greece, but I didn’t expect to feel so comfortable when I arrived. Walking the narrow staircases and standing above the sea, I felt a sense of belonging that surprised me.

Finally seeing Cycladic architecture in person deepened that feeling. It was one thing to admire it from a distance. It was another to be inside it.

Seeing the whitewashed forms stacked above the Aegean Sea reminded me of Claim It For Yourself.

Some of the softer colors and textures brought me back to Uncovering Yourself.

Looking at them again, I noticed how their forms carried different kinds of movement. Claim It For Yourself felt like an ascent, the way Oia rises from the cliffs. Uncovering Yourself felt quieter, like something being sifted through or revealed.

None of this was intentional at the time.

I don’t know if the paintings were speaking to me or hinting at something ahead, but I like the possibility. Abstract work often reveals different meanings depending on where someone is in their life, and I’m not exempt from that. Maybe my own paintings are capable of speaking to different versions of me too.

I’ve always heard that time isn’t linear. Moments like this make the idea feel a little less theoretical. Maybe certain insights arrive only when we’re ready to see them.