The Stories That Refuse to Explain Themselves
“The most powerful stories are the ones we don’t fully understand.” — Deborah Scott
There’s something unsettling about a story that doesn’t resolve. It lingers, sticks to you, makes you turn it over in your mind long after you’ve walked away. That’s the space where my work lives—not in the neatly packaged narratives, but in the fractures, the omissions, the things left unsaid.
Take Talking Fish—one of my most dissected, debated, and deliberately ambiguous paintings. (You can find it on my website here.) At first glance, it’s disorienting. The figure is present, yet somehow conversing with an imaginary fish that clearly exists in some non-real universe. The composition suggests interaction, but with an unnerving disengagement from reality.
So what’s the story? That’s the wrong question.
Why We Resist the Unknowable
We crave explanations. We want meaning served up clean, no mess, no ambiguity. But reality doesn’t work that way. Neither does my art.
I think a lot about Johari’s Window, the psychological framework that maps the tension between what we reveal, what we hide, what others see, and what no one (not even ourselves) can grasp. My paintings operate in that fourth quadrant—the space of the unknowable. The part of us that resists clarity, resists definition.
That’s where the power is.
The best stories—whether in literature, film, or visual art—leave something unresolved. They sit in your subconscious and make you work for it. Think of Mulholland Drive, Waiting for Godot, or even the Mona Lisa’s half-smile. They don’t give you everything. They let you question, they let you participate.
Disrupting the Expected
In my work, disruption is intentional. A gesture that suggests connection but doesn’t confirm it. A gaze that feels familiar but unreadable. A figure that occupies space yet seems slightly removed from it. That tension—between what is offered and what is withheld—is where the real story unfolds.
When you look at Talking Fish, you’re not just seeing an image. You’re engaging with an unstable narrative. The brain wants to make sense of it, but the work resists. And that’s the point.
Why Uncertainty Makes Art More Powerful
If you walk away from a painting knowing exactly what it means, it’s done its job wrong. The most compelling works hold space for interpretation, contradiction, and tension. They allow multiple truths to exist at once.
So when someone asks me, “What does this painting mean?”—I’ll usually flip the question back:
“What do you see?”
Because at the end of the day, the real meaning isn’t just in the work. It’s in the space between what’s given and what’s grasped.
Keep Questioning. Keep Looking.
Art isn’t about finding answers—it’s about learning to sit with the questions. If you want to step into that space with me, check out Talking Fish and other works on my site here. Let me know what you see—what lingers, what disrupts, what refuses to explain itself.