On cars, horses, speed, and the different ways we experience power.
There are very few places where my mind becomes completely quiet.
Behind the wheel is one of them.
I have always loved cars, but more importantly, I love driving them. Many people see driving as the necessary part of getting somewhere. I have never felt that way. Give me a great car and an open road and the drive itself can be the destination.
The sound. The movement. The road ahead. The concentration that makes everything else temporarily irrelevant.
Driving is one of my happy places.
So when cars began appearing in my paintings, they were never simply beautiful objects I had chosen to paint. They were already part of a world I genuinely loved.
Would I collect cars if I could?
Absolutely.
For now, my garage has limitations, so perhaps painting them has become one way of building the collection. If you cannot fit everything you want in the garage, you find another way to live with it.
Then horses entered my life.
And unexpectedly, another place where my mind could become completely quiet appeared.
A Different Measure of Speed
When I started learning to ride, I discovered something that bothered me tremendously.
I am someone who tends to believe that if I decide to learn something, I will figure it out quickly. Yet I could comfortably drive a car at 100 miles per hour while ten miles per hour on horseback could feel absolutely enormous.
It made no sense to me.
At least mathematically.
For the first few years of learning to ride, that difference stayed with me. I wanted to get past it. I wanted to understand why my perception of speed changed so dramatically simply because I was in a saddle instead of behind a windshield.
Eventually, I crossed that invisible line.
I stopped thinking primarily about the speed and started wanting more of it. Ten miles per hour became fifteen, then twenty, and eventually I found myself passing the twenty-five-mile mark.
And then I discovered the truly fascinating part.
Speed on horseback still feels nothing like speed in a car.
A car can be traveling at 70, 100, even 120 miles per hour, and there is an extraordinary amount of engineering between you and that speed. The suspension, the seat, the chassis, the windshield, the entire machine has been designed to manage enormous forces while making you feel remarkably composed inside them.
A great car can make extraordinary speed feel almost effortless.
On a horse, you feel the power differently.
You feel every stride underneath you. You feel the acceleration through your entire body. You feel the ground, the wind, the change in balance. There is no speedometer required to convince you that you are moving.
The number would tell you the car is faster.
Your body tells you something completely different.
That still blows my mind.
Perhaps that is why I have never experienced cars and horses as opposites.
I don't think of cars as technology and horses as nature. That distinction may be technically true, but emotionally it misses everything I love about both.
I experience them through movement.
Through concentration.
Through power.
Through the strange happiness that comes from moving forward fast enough that there is no room in your head for anything except the moment you are in.
There is freedom in both.
And there is something wild in both.
Two Kinds of Power
Cars have occupied my paintings for years.
I am fascinated by the machines that become more than transportation — the ones that survive generations of changing design and still make people stop when they enter a room or hear an engine approaching.
There is human ambition embedded in them.
Someone imagined that form.
Someone engineered that performance.
Someone decided that functional was not enough.
Horses came into my work through a different door.
First came riding. Then came the relationship.
Learning to ride taught me very quickly that confidence and competence are not the same thing. Progress required repetition, physical strength, timing, patience, and the willingness to keep returning to something until my body understood what my mind already wanted to do.
But horses also introduced me to a kind of power I had never experienced in quite the same way.
Not power observed from a distance.
Power underneath me.
And as horses became part of my life, they inevitably began entering my work.
The subjects may look completely different on the surface, but to me the emotional connection was already there.
Movement.
Beauty.
Strength.
Individuality.
And the irresistible desire to experience all of it personally.
Love Your Wild
That is what makes Love Your Wild feel so natural to me.
Opening September 19, 2026, at Monthaven Arts & Cultural Center, the exhibition brings my paintings together with the wild-horse photography of Tim West.
Across more than 40 paintings and photographs, two visual worlds meet: iconic machines shaped by human imagination and horses whose power, beauty, and independence have existed long before any of us attempted to define them.
Tim's photographs bring us close to America's wild horses as they actually exist — powerful, vulnerable, individual, and still beautifully untamed.
My paintings approach power from another direction: cars, objects, figures and forms that carry stories of design, ambition, memory, movement, and American culture.
Placed together, something interesting happens.
The distinction between the two worlds becomes less important than what they share.
Power can be engineered or born.
Beauty can be polished or covered in dust.
Freedom can be found on an open road or across an open range.
And perhaps wildness has less to do with where something comes from than with our refusal to remove everything unpredictable from life.
More Than an Exhibition
There is another reason this exhibition matters to me.
A portion of artwork sales from Love Your Wild will benefit Forever Branded, a national nonprofit working in the rescue and relocation of America's wild horses and burros.
More than 20,000 animals have already been helped through its work.
That connection gives the exhibition a responsibility beyond the gallery walls.
Wild horses are extraordinarily beautiful subjects. They are also living animals facing very real questions about management, displacement, rescue, adoption, and what their future in America will look like.
If we are going to celebrate them through art, I believe there is value in allowing that celebration to contribute to their future as well.
The exhibition also supports Monthaven's broader mission. A portion of proceeds will help fund art education classes for children and adults, exhibitions, outreach, and healing-arts programs serving underserved youth, families, and military veterans.
Art can preserve a story.
It can start a conversation.
And sometimes it can materially support the very things that inspired it.
What It Means to Love Your Wild
I have spent much of my life learning the value of structure.
Structure helps me work.
Discipline helps me improve.
Control allows me to take an idea and actually bring it into existence.
My paintings themselves are built this way — thousands of deliberate decisions slowly organized into something complete.
But I have also learned that a life built entirely around control would be terribly uninteresting.
Some things should still make your heart beat faster.
Some things should challenge your confidence.
Some things should require courage before competence.
Some things should make you forget to look at the clock.
For me, driving does that.
Horses do that.
Painting does that.
Maybe Love Your Wild is not really about choosing between the engineered and the untamed.
Maybe it is about recognizing the things that make us feel intensely alive — and making sure we leave enough room in our lives for them.
I know what mine are.