Test or Rest Series

​

This painting series was born in the furnace of downtown Los Angeles, where I held what was widely called the most stressful job on earth—senior taxable-bond trader, and I was one of the highest-volume traders in the country. Every day I had a three-hour crawl across the concrete parking lot of L.A. freeways, then ended with the raw energy of raising rebellious teenagers. Somewhere between the closing bell and bedtime, I painted. Somewhere I managed to build a major eBay bookselling business from scratch.

​

The Test or Rest series is the ledger of that period of time: canvases squeezed from the margins of chaos, each stroke a question—test or rest?They record a season of explosive growth and quiet unraveling. I had no father left to impress, no mother’s love to chase. Orphaned in spirit, I seized the biblical promise: “A father to the fatherless…” (Psalm 68:5). I begged God to keep it. Still, the anchor slipped. I painted to find one.These works are not serene. They are a question made visible—color fields under strain, compositions that refuse to resolve, edges that fight the frame. They ask what a life of a showman is for when applause doesn’t exist, and direction is unclear. They answer, faintly, that the struggle itself isn’t enough, and trying to find rest through the constant test of what I perceived as mediocre became disheartening. Nothing was left, but to beg God for intervening and that all watching would be blessed by my life as opposed to being tormented by one like I witnessed.