People occasionally ask whether my background in product design influences my paintings.
For a long time, I didn’t think it did.
Product design and portrait painting seem to have very little in common. One lives on screens. The other hangs on walls. One is measured by usability, the other by something much harder to define. When I left software to pursue painting full time, I assumed I was leaving one discipline behind and starting another from scratch.
It took me a while, before I realized that wasn’t what had happened. The biggest thing I carried with me wasn’t a technical skill or a design process. It was a way of thinking.
As a product designer, I spent years removing things. Every button, every label, every interaction had to justify its existence. If something distracted from the user’s goal, it was simplified or removed entirely. Good design wasn’t about adding features. It was about deciding what wasn’t necessary. That instinct quietly followed me into the studio.
When people see my work, they often assume the process is about building an image layer by layer until it becomes more detailed. In reality, I’m doing almost the opposite. Every stencil, every glaze, and every decision is really an attempt to determine how little information I can provide before the viewer’s mind completes the rest. I’m still editing, only now the questions revolve around edges, values, and form instead of menus and interfaces.
That shift in medium turned out to matter far less than I expected. Whether I’m designing software or making a painting, I’m still trying to create clarity by deciding what doesn’t need to exist. The goal isn’t minimalism for its own sake. It’s to remove distractions until what’s left feels inevitable.
That way of thinking extends beyond the finished work. Before I touch paper, I’ve usually spent hours planning. There are digital studies, color explorations, production drawings for the stencils, and a sequence for how every mask will be applied. It probably looks excessive for a painting, but it feels completely natural to me. Product design taught me that careful preparation creates room for better decisions later. I’ve never seen planning as the opposite of creativity. If anything, it gives creativity a stronger foundation.
Even my studio reflects that background. Alongside paint and paper are cutting mats, vector drawings, prototypes, discarded iterations, and a process that evolves after every finished piece. Sometimes it feels less like a traditional painting studio and more like a workshop devoted to designing a repeatable way of making paintings.
Looking back, I think that’s why I became interested in ideas like information theory, perceptual completion, and restraint. I didn’t go searching for those concepts because I wanted to intellectualize my work. I found them because they described decisions I was already making instinctively. They gave names to habits that had been developing long before I ever thought of myself as a painter.
The irony is that I probably think about design more now than I did when it was my profession. Painting has convinced me that design isn’t defined by software, interfaces, or technology. Those are simply places where design happens. At its core, design is the practice of deciding what deserves to exist and what can be left out. A painting asks those questions just as often as an interface does, even if the answers look completely different.
When I left product design, I thought I was changing careers. Looking back, I think I was carrying the same philosophy into a different medium. The software disappeared, but the habit of reducing, editing, and refining remained. The tools changed. The questions simply found a new place to live.