I’d continue directly from that opening and shift from the fun Hollywood story into why it actually mattered.
It was a long time ago. Long enough that, looking back now, the whole thing feels a little like a dream.
But no, I swear it happened. I was there. I was part of the negotiations.
My paintings had been selected for Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Yes, that Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie. One of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters of the time.
Somehow, paintings that had started their lives in my studio were about to end up on a Hollywood set. It was surreal then, and honestly, it still feels a little surreal now.
And here's the funny part: this was before we all lived our lives on social media. There was no Instagram post from the set, no behind-the-scenes Reel, no obligatory “BIG NEWS!” announcement with fifteen hashtags. You had an extraordinary thing happen, told some people about it... and then life moved on.
So, nearly two decades late, consider this my post.
My paintings went to Hollywood.
But what does something like that actually mean for an artist?
Of course, there is the obvious answer: it's exciting.
A major film production could have chosen thousands of paintings. Sets like these are incredibly deliberate. Everything you see on screen—the furniture, the architecture, the clothes, the objects sitting on a table—is helping create a world and tell you something about the people who inhabit it.
Art is part of that language.
So when someone looks at your paintings and decides, these belong in this world, that's a remarkable kind of recognition.
But I think there's something else about it that means more to me now than it perhaps did at the time.
Artists spend an enormous amount of their lives making things without knowing where those things will eventually go.
You stand in a studio looking at a canvas from three feet away. You make a decision. You scrape it off. You make another. You wonder whether the painting is finished, whether it works, whether anyone else will see what you see in it.
There is absolutely nothing glamorous about most of this process.
And then the painting leaves you.
Maybe it ends up in someone's home. Maybe a collector lives with it for thirty years. Maybe it hangs in an exhibition where hundreds of strangers walk past it.
Or maybe, completely unexpectedly, it ends up in a Hollywood movie.
That's one of the things I've come to love about making art: you don't get to know the entire life of a painting when you create it.
Once it leaves the studio, it begins collecting its own history.
And having my work selected for Mr. & Mrs. Smith became one small—and admittedly pretty fantastic—chapter in the history of those paintings.
I also think moments like this matter because artists don't always receive obvious markers telling us we're on the right track. There isn't necessarily a promotion coming. There isn't a quarterly review. Much of an artist's career is built slowly, through years of making work, exhibiting it, putting it in front of people and continuing even when nobody is paying particularly close attention.
Then, every once in a while, something happens that makes you stop.
Someone saw the work.
Someone remembered it.
Someone thought it belonged.
For me, this was one of those moments.
And yes, having Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie somewhere in the story certainly didn't hurt.