Why I refuse to "Pick A Lane"
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There’s a popular piece of advice in the art world: pick a lane.
You’ve probably heard it in different forms.
“Are you a landscape painter or a figurative painter?”
“Are you going to focus on trains or seascapes?”
“You need one clear niche if you want to be taken seriously.”
On paper, that advice makes sense. A narrow niche is easy to market.
A gallery knows exactly where to put you. A collector knows exactly what to expect.
But the more I painted, the less that rule fit the way I experience the world.
In this post, I want to share how I think about my own body of work—and why the trains, shorelines, and quiet everyday moments you’ll find in my portfolio all belong to one emotional world.
The Problem With Picking Just One Lane
When I look at my own life, the things that matter most don’t line up in neat categories.
The same mind that is moved by a steam locomotive pushing through winter light is also moved by a child pressed to a window, a lighthouse at dusk, or a quiet moment in a kitchen before the day begins.
Those aren’t separate compartments—they’re all part of one emotional landscape.
Yet the message I kept hearing was: Choose one.
Be “the train guy.”
Or “the shore painter.”
Or “the family-portrait painter.”
What I actually wanted to paint was the way all of those things talk to each other: memory and motion, past and present, place and relationship.
So I stopped trying to choose.
One Emotional World, Many Subjects
If you look across my work, you’ll see what I mean.
Yes, there are trains, viaducts, and railyards—paintings that carry the romance of machinery, history, and travel.
Alongside them, you’ll find quieter, interior moments: children waiting at a window, a family gathering around a table, a pianist lost in the music, someone resting after a long day. These paintings explore intimacy, ritual, and the small, powerful moments that shape us.
Then there are the coastal pieces: lighthouses, dunes, shorelines, and moonlit water. Many of them come from places that are personally significant to me—familiar stretches of the Jersey Shore, Cape May, and rivers and beaches that shaped my own memories. They’re not just pretty views; they’re memory maps.
On the surface, this might look like three or four different careers: a railroad painter, a coastal painter, a family-life painter, a figurative painter.
But I don’t experience them that way.
To me, they all live in one world:
A world where light, memory, and motion are the main characters.
The Real “Niche”: Memory, Motion, and Light
When I finally stopped worrying about picking one subject lane, I realized my real niche was never a category like “trains” or “landscapes.” My niche was emotional.
It lives in:
- The nostalgia of a shoreline you’ve visited a hundred times
- The hum of a locomotive that connects generations
- The warmth of a kitchen before dawn or the hush of a room after everyone’s gone to bed
- The feeling of watching someone you love and knowing this moment will stay with you
That’s why you’ll see the same painterly language—soft edges, atmospheric light, a sense of quiet narrative—whether I’m painting rails in snow, a lighthouse at twilight, or a figure in a dim room.
The consistency isn’t in the subject.
It’s in the way of seeing.
Why I Chose to Break the “Pick a Lane” Rule
For me, refusing to pick a lane is about being honest.
My life doesn’t unfold in isolated subject categories. I don’t stop being who I am when I step off a train platform and onto a beach, or when I walk from a shoreline into a family gathering. Those moments are all fragments of the same story.
So instead of separating them, I let them talk to each other on the canvas.
A train painting can carry the weight of family legacy.
A beach scene can hold the ache of time passing.
An interior can echo with the same quiet as a foggy shoreline.
By breaking the “rule,” I allow my work to do what I most want it to do:
honor the connections between people, place, and memory.
What I Hope Viewers Feel
If you’ve followed my work over time, you’ve seen it move between rail yards, shorelines, and intimate interiors.
My hope is that collectors don’t just see a list of subjects, but a continuous story.
Not necessarily of the specific place, but of the feeling:
- That pull of nostalgia
- That awareness of time moving forward
- That bittersweet blend of motion and stillness
- That sense that we carry certain places and people with us, long after we’ve left them
If my paintings seem “all over the place” in subject but strangely unified in mood, that’s intentional. I’m less interested in building a product line and more interested in building a world—a visual and emotional universe where all of these threads meet.
In the End, My “Lane” Is the World I Build
So no, I haven’t picked a single lane.
I paint trains and shorelines, interiors and figures, small-town streets and moonlit horizons.
What holds them together is my commitment to painting the quiet poetry of everyday life—the way light falls on the things we remember, the way motion and stillness coexist, the way place and relationship shape the stories we carry.
If that breaks a rule, I’m perfectly comfortable with that.
Because in the end, I don’t want to be known only as “the painter of X subject.”
I want to be known as someone who paints the world we actually live in:
messy, interconnected, and full of moments that refuse to stay in their lane.
If you spend time with my paintings here on FASO, I hope you’ll start to see those threads—across subjects, across series, and across years. And if one of those pieces feels like it belongs to your own story, I’m honored to have it find a home with you.