How the Collection Was Born (Shelfies: The Things We Keep)
I didn't have to go far to find the inspiration for The Things We Keep. It was right there in my living room, staring back at me.
It started in a workshop led by artist Jenny Nelson (@nelsonpainter). The exercise was called "Lines from Life" — simple enough in concept: look around you, find something real, and let it guide your hand. Most artists might scan the room for a single compelling object.
I looked up and saw everything at once.
My living room shelves are basically a time capsule. Vintage finds from flea markets and antique shops. Objects I dragged home from travels — a small ceramic piece from Portugal, something hand-thrown from a market I stumbled into. Heirlooms that arrived wrapped in tissue paper or tucked inside a moving box, carrying someone else's history alongside my own. Every shelf is a layer of memory, and I'd been living with all of it so long I'd almost stopped seeing it.
My great-grandmother’s Belleek china
The exercise made me see it again.
I started drawing outlines — not the objects themselves, but the shapes they suggested. Cups. Plates. Vases. Books. Picture frames. Then I turned the canvas and did it again. The grid I kept returning to gave the whole thing structure, and the border I left around the edges felt right too, like a frame within a frame, a way of saying: these things matter.
Something unexpected happened in that repetition. The shapes stopped looking like the objects that inspired them and started becoming something else entirely. Abstract forms that held the memory of a cup without being a cup. The suggestion of a vase without the vase. The outlines multiplied and overlapped until the canvas felt full of presence — the presence of all the things we keep and what we keep them for.
That's what the Shelfie Collection is really about. Not the objects. The keeping.
Each painting I've made since is a meditation on that act — holding onto things, people, memories, dreams. What we choose to put on a shelf and why. What we inherit and what we collect on purpose. The series has grown in directions I didn't anticipate when I first started drawing those overlapping outlines, but the root of it hasn't changed: I'm trying to paint the weight of the things that matter to us, translated into form and color and line.
It turns out abstraction is a pretty good language for memory. Neither one is ever quite literal.
I’m always adding one-of-a-kind Shelfies to the shop. Find your favorites before they’re gone.