I'm chasing something I can't quite name, but I know it when I find it. That's what keeps me painting and writing songs—this relentless pull toward a feeling, a truth, something just beyond reach. Whether I'm working with oil, acrylic, and spray paint on canvas or arranging indie-rock and alt-country songs, I'm doing the same thing: trying to capture what words alone can't touch.

My paintings draw from Rothko, Pollock, and Van Gogh—artists who understood that color and gesture can convey what language cannot. I work fast, letting instinct take over before my brain can interfere. I mix in elements of the desert where I live: sand, pencil, charcoal. These materials from the landscape become part of the work itself.

I grew up in Massachusetts, went to Syracuse University on an athletic scholarship, and after college worked a regular job in New York City. But I'd come home to my studio apartment, light candles, and record myself on a tape recorder. One day this feeling came over me—an 'a-ha!' moment: This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. In 2001, I drove across the country to Los Angeles, leaving behind income and safety to really go for it. Growing into being an artist is excruciatingly hard and takes a very long time, but I had to make that move.

These days I'm out in the desert in Landers. After years in cities—Boston, New York, Los Angeles—I found something in the openness of the Mojave that allowed me to exhale. The space, the silence, the way light shifts across the landscape: it all feeds the work. The desert isn't just where I live—it's in the paintings themselves, mixed into the surfaces, informing the palette.

What I'm essentially doing is painting, writing songs, recording them, and sharing it all with as many people as possible. It's about paying attention—to emotion, to landscape, to the moments that make us human. But here I am all these years later. It's what I do and probably will always be doing.

@bradbyrd