I try to see and paint the person exactly as they are. Both parts: seeing and painting are equally challenging. Exactitude is hard. I fight the urge to edit imperfections, to judge what is beautiful. Here is the opportunity to stare long enough to find the small vein that rests just below the surface, barely there in its blueness; or to study an eye that has spent a lifetime observing the world. Gaze long enough upon this face—the marks and patinas of its days, some earned and some stamped there—and its spots become like galaxies in the cosmic web of a life. This painting is the log of a journey, an account of each galaxy visited.