Why I Paint Memories Instead of Reality

One of the questions I’m asked most often is, “Why don’t you paint things the way they actually look?”  The answer is simple.

Because that’s not how I remember them.

Memory has never been a photograph. It’s an emotional reconstruction—a collection of fragments stitched together by time, experience, and feeling. We don’t remember every brick on a building, every wrinkle in a face, or every cloud in the sky. We remember what mattered. We remember the way a place felt, the conversation we had, the music that was playing, or the color of the afternoon light.

That’s the world I try to paint.

As a former architect, I spent decades creating precise drawings where accuracy was everything. Every line had a purpose. Every measurement mattered. Buildings had to stand. Clients depended on precision.

Architecture taught me discipline, composition, balance, and structure. I still carry those lessons into every painting I make. Even when my work appears spontaneous or abstract, there’s an underlying framework holding everything together. I don’t think I’ll ever stop seeing the world through an architect’s eyes.

But painting gives me something architecture never could.

Freedom.

When I paint, I’m no longer concerned with documenting reality. I’m interested in revealing something deeper than appearances. My goal isn’t to reproduce a scene—it’s to recreate the feeling of having lived it.

That’s why Cubism has always resonated with me.

The early Cubists understood that reality isn’t experienced from a single viewpoint. We move through space. We remember events from different angles. We collect moments over time. A memory isn’t frozen—it shifts and evolves every time we revisit it.  Cubism gave artists permission to paint that experience instead of merely recording it.

When I fragment a face, simplify a building, or layer intersecting planes of color, I’m not trying to make the subject more complicated. I’m trying to make it more honest.

Life itself is layered.  We carry childhood into adulthood. Old conversations echo inside new relationships. Cities we visited decades ago still influence the way we see today’s skyline. Music from our youth can transport us across fifty years in an instant.

Memory doesn’t erase the past.  It keeps adding to it.

Color plays a similar role in my work.  Because of my grapheme-color synesthesia, colors often arrive intuitively rather than analytically. They become part of the emotional language of the painting rather than simply describing what something looked like. Sometimes a deep cobalt blue feels like reflection. A bold crimson suggests energy or tension. Warm golds can evoke nostalgia or hope.

I don’t consciously assign those meanings.  They simply emerge.  Over time I’ve learned to trust them.

People sometimes ask why my buildings seem alive.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve always believed they are.  After spending much of my career designing architecture, I stopped thinking of buildings as objects. They began to feel more like personalities. Some are quiet and reserved. Others command attention the moment you see them. Some age gracefully. Others fight against time.  In many ways, they’re like people.  That’s why my architectural paintings aren’t really about architecture.  They’re about character.

The same is true of my paintings of couples. They’re rarely portraits of specific individuals. They’re stories about relationships—the subtle tension between two people, the shared history that exists without words, the invisible threads connecting one life to another.

The figures become symbols for experiences we’ve all had.  Love.  Distance.  Joy.  Regret. Hope.

I want viewers to recognize themselves somewhere inside the painting, even if they’ve never met the people depicted.

Music works this way too.

A Beatles song doesn’t simply remind us of the Beatles. It reminds us of where we were when we first heard it. Who we were with. What was happening in our lives. The music becomes inseparable from memory.

That’s one reason I’ve enjoyed creating work inspired by the Beatles and the British Invasion. Those songs are woven into our collective history. They don’t belong to one generation—they continue creating new memories while preserving old ones.

Art has the same power.  The paintings we choose to live with become markers of our own lives.

Years later, we don’t just remember buying them.

We remember where they hung during family celebrations. The conversations they witnessed. The changing seasons outside the windows. The chapters of our lives unfolding around them.  Eventually the artwork becomes part of our personal history.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t think of my paintings as decorations.  I think of them as companions.  They quietly collect memories alongside us.

When someone purchases one of my paintings, I hope they see more than bold colors or geometric forms. I hope they recognize a feeling they thought had been forgotten.

Maybe it’s the excitement of traveling through Europe decades ago.  Maybe it’s childhood.  Maybe it’s first love.  Maybe it’s simply the realization that life has been beautifully complicated.

If a painting can awaken one of those moments—if it can pause someone for just a few seconds and reconnect them with a piece of themselves—then I feel I’ve succeeded.

Reality tells us what happened.  Memory tells us why it mattered.  And that, more than anything, is why I paint memories instead of reality.