Where the Water Breaks — Colorado River
Turbulence
Two hundred forty miles. Ten days. A raft, a river, and a current older than memory.
I joined the trip knowing it would be an adventure — white water, canyon walls, movement — but what stayed with me wasn’t the distance or the scale. It was a single recurring moment: the instant a rapid rises, the raft lifts, and the river comes over the top of us.
You know it’s coming. You see the swell build. You brace. You hear the rush before it reaches you. And then — the water breaks over the raft and your body at once.
Cold. Sudden. Alive.
In that split second, I don’t just feel the river — I choose to see it. I don’t want to miss it. Sunlight catches inside the surge. Grit flashes through it like moving earth. The wave isn’t one color; it’s many — mineral greens, silted golds, deep blues, translucent whites. The force is undeniable, but it isn’t violent. It’s purposeful. It’s carrying time.
I squeal every time — part delight, part terror, part recognition.
Because in that moment something becomes clear. Rapids exist because of resistance. The rocks beneath the surface interrupt the current, and the water responds by rising, turning, surging, finding another way forward. The power isn’t separate from the obstacle. It’s created by it.
Standing in that rush of cold water, I feel the echo of daily life — the way our challenges shape us, redirect us, demand that we adapt. The river doesn’t fight the rocks. It becomes more fully itself because they’re there.
There’s a connection in that instant — an awareness that you are not separate from what’s happening. You’re not watching the river. You’re inside its motion. The raft rises, drops, steadies. Breath returns. The canyon walls hold everything in quiet witness.
That sensation — of power, light, resistance, and flow existing at once — is something I carry back to the studio with me. Not as an image, but as a state. When I paint, I’m not trying to recreate the river. I’m trying to return to that moment inside it — when force, matter, and presence meet, and you feel yourself fully there.
Those are the moments that shape my work. Not the ones I see.
The ones I step into.