French Titles, Why?

Le lac garde son temps (The Lake Keeps its Weather)

2026

Acrylic on canvas

84 × 108 in

I’ve begun giving many of these paintings French titles, not because the paintings are about France, but because French painting has become part of the territory they pass through.

I keep returning to Corot and Cézanne—to Corot’s atmosphere, memory, intimacy, and tonal unity, and to Cézanne’s sense that the world is being constructed and destabilized at the same time. I’m not trying to imitate either of them. I’m processing something I find in that tradition through the sensibility of an American painter working now.

The French titles acknowledge that lineage, but they also create a useful distance—a bit of detachment, a lyrical dissonance. In English, a title such as The Lake Holds Its Weather can feel almost explanatory. Le lac retient son temps becomes slightly unfamiliar. It remains poetic, but it no longer tells the viewer quite so directly what to see. The title becomes another layer in the painting rather than a caption beneath it.

That distance matters to me. These paintings contain recognizable things—gardens, lakes, moons, waterfalls, weather—but I don’t want those things to become illustrations or narratives. They are fragments of experience embedded within something larger, stranger, and less stable.

French painting has given me a way to think about landscape that allows beauty without sentimentality, intimacy without modesty, and ambition without the old heroic baggage of monumental American abstraction. The French titles feel like a quiet acknowledgment of that inheritance.

The paintings are not about French painting. They look toward it, ponder it, argue with it, and acknowledge it.