With You Beside Me, the Day Is Brighter (Day Dog Walk)

2025, oil on linen, 8 x 10 x 1.5 in, walnut floater frame

You’re walking with your dog along the shoreline in bright midday light, the world washed in warm color and quiet stillness. The scale of the painting is intimate—small enough to feel like a memory you could hold in your hand, a moment kept rather than magnified. Where the night pieces in this series lean into solitude and thresholds, this one turns toward companionship and simple joy. The brilliance of the light isn’t spectacle; it’s affirmation. The ordinary turns luminous when it’s shared.

The figures stay small against the sweep of sky and water, emphasizing how wide the world is, yet their closeness pulls your attention in. The painting suggests that meaning often lives in the smallest gestures: the sound of footsteps in sand, the steady rhythm of a shared walk, the presence of another living body moving in time with your own. It reads less like a portrait of faces and more like a portrait of connection.

In a world that keeps asking you to hurry, this image quietly refuses. It holds the softness of time slowed down, the sense that a day can feel wider when you allow yourself to live inside it fully.