Blog / 2025 / Delightful Detail

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

This is me making a painting of the building I live in, starting with a charcoal drawing on canvas. The building is on a main street in my town where most of the properties have apartments along with commercial space on the ground floor, and the store in my building happens to be a chocolate shop. Next to the display windows for the store is the entrance to my apartment, and that door has a window in it too, a window that I’ve been filling with my art for the last few months—paintings of skeletons and turkeys and holiday-themed stuff like that.

This time, I decided to make something a little different for my door. I decided to paint the very scene that the door is in, because it amused me to think of someone noticing the painting and realizing that the tiny door in my painting has a painting of the building in it as well—the idea being that, though my eyesight and my brushes aren’t precise enough to make it clear, the painting in the door that’s in this painting also has a painting in it, and in that painting the door doubtless has a painting in it as well, and on and on in a never-ending series of doors and smaller and smaller paintings of this building.

It’s a bit of whimsy in a world that feels increasingly run by people who think way too much of themselves and way too little of the rest of us. This painting is me sharing a tiny moment of delight with anyone who’s observant enough to notice my artwork.

And that would have to be a person who really pays attention to detail, because the chocolate shop next door always has stunning window displays! In fact, it’s those displays that first made me want to make this painting. I liked the idea of honoring the joy and creativity that goes into designing for those windows—especially the year or so during which one of the displays always included a gorilla dressed up in various seasonal outfits. I loved walking out my front door every day and waving hello to my hairy friend.