Blog / 2026 / A Blossoming of Liberty

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

This is the Liberty Bell painting I ended up making, but “oooh” was it ever a journey to get here.

This is how it started. I wanted to paint this important monument as part of an assignment I gave myself for the 250^th anniversary of the United States: to reclaim American symbols from an administration that has no business being in charge of our country’s special birthday.

But, at the beginning of the year, I couldn’t figure out how to make a painting that felt full or complete. The bell is an inanimate object—it’s full of meaning and grandeur, yes, but still inanimate. Thinking I’d been too “inanimate” in the way I’d put down the paint to this point, here you can see how I tried going in with bolder, more dynamic marks. Still, it wasn’t working for me.

Then, in June, I decided to start over completely by designing this coloring page that includes the US’s national flower, the rose, and that’s when things got interesting. The composition finally had more life to it—literally—and that helped me to find a flow in the piece. I decided that the bell would be a partial rainbow from yellow at the bottom through oranges, reds, purples to blue at the top, and that helped me see the gradient I’d need in the background.

But, as often happens to me when I paint over a canvas to begin again as I did here, I was struggling with the plasticky feel of the surface. Sometimes, I like to water down my acrylics and, in those cases, I depend on the way the paints absorb into the surface to get the look I’m after. I might have made the plasticky surface work, but I wanted the painting to have a certain feel, so I started over once again to make the final version of this image. This time I started over on a fresh canvas.

To be fair, my desire to give the piece a fresh beginning might have also been a little bit influenced by forces outside my studio: specifically, the results of the Midterm Elections. This, my definitive Liberty Bell painting, came together in just the last week, since progressives took back the US legislature.

In fact, it occurs to me that all the trouble I had with this image might have been an expression of my worry over the direction of the United States in the last two years. And that’s why it was only after last week’s epic rejection of cruelty and corruption that the piece finally felt right.

Happy 250, friends!