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There’s something strangely comforting about walking down a cereal aisle. It's loud with color, busy with characters, and humming with decades of branding, yet we rarely notice how deeply these visuals are imprinted on us.

In Pattern Recognition, I wanted to slow that moment down. Not to render it realistically, but to interpret it—through gesture, rhythm, and paint. Each cereal box becomes a symbol, not just of what it contains, but of the memory it stirs: Saturday mornings, cartoons, choices made in a blink. There’s joy in these rows, but also structure—desire organized into shelf space.

The painting is intentionally divided into tiers: familiar mascots and color-coded packaging move in sequences, like musical notes or repeated phrases. I played with the tension between control and chaos—structured bands of color giving way to expressive brushwork, suggestion over clarity.

The title comes from that moment of instant visual recognition we all experience: the mind filling in detail even when it’s not fully painted. We don’t need to read the labels to know what’s in each box. That instinct—our attraction to patterns, to nostalgia, to sweetness—is part of the language I’m trying to speak here.

This piece stands between realism and abstraction, between memory and marketing. I hope it makes you feel something soft and familiar—maybe even hungry :)

My latest painting, "You Always Picked the Orange One", returns to one of my most personally resonant subjects — the grocery aisle — but this time through a looser, more painterly lens. Measuring 24x24", this piece captures a shelf of glass-bottled sodas, their colors refracting and doubling in the reflective surface below. There’s a row of orange drinks, followed by sea-foam green bottles, and below, a mirror of dark purples, greens, and yellows.

This painting leans into impressionism more than past aisle works. I was less interested in crisp product likeness and more focused on the gesture of color, the energy of repetition, and how packaging becomes abstracted when seen as rhythm instead of object.

What I love most is the interaction between order and chaos. The top row tries to keep it together — brands, rows, and shapes — but the bottom, reflected shelf becomes a dance of dots and smudges, like a Monet with bottle caps. The labels dissolve into brushstrokes, and yet the identity of each drink is somehow still there — familiar, inviting, nostalgic.

I think this painting quietly asks: how do we navigate choice in a world that repeats itself endlessly? It’s a still life, yes, but also a meditation on consumerism’s strange poetry — the way a soda shelf can feel like a chorus of voices vying for attention, or maybe just a celebration of color doing what it does best.

This piece is available direct from my studio. As always, thank you for looking — and for loving the aisles as much as I do.