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Occupied Vacancy
[11.4.25 Courtyard by Marriott, Burbank, CA]
Oil on torn canvas. 30” x 40”. 2026.
Hotel rooms are designed to erase evidence of those who pass through them. Occupied Vacancy resists that erasure.
This painting preserves a moment that exists somewhere between beginning and ending, desire and grief, permanence and departure. Expressive color shifts the work away from narrative documentation toward emotional memory, where perception becomes less concerned with accuracy than with the way love alters the world around us.
Like much of my practice, the work begins with a material that has already been altered. Rather than seeking an untouched surface, I was interested in what could emerge from one that already carried its own history. Painted on a previously torn canvas, the work retains the visible evidence of that history, refusing to disguise or overwrite it. The tears become part of the painting’s visual language, proposing that traces of rupture are not interruptions to beauty, but evidence of what has already been endured.
The title suggests vacancy not as emptiness, but as the lingering presence left behind after someone has gone. In doing so, the work considers how fleeting encounters become enduring internal landscapes.