What Architecture Taught Me About Painting

Both disciplines ask the same question: how does a person move through this space? In a building, it's their body — where a hallway narrows to slow you down, where a room opens up to let you exhale, where a window is placed so the light arrives at a particular hour and not before. In a painting, it's their eye. The logic is identical, even if the materials couldn't be more different.

I trained as an architect before I trained as anything resembling a painter, and for a long time I thought those were two separate parts of my life — one analytical, one intuitive. It took years of standing in front of my own canvases to notice I was still asking the same questions I'd been taught to ask about a floor plan. Where does the eye enter this piece? What stops it from leaving too quickly? What does it discover on a second, slower look that it missed on the first?

Composition, it turns out, is just architecture without the physical constraint of gravity. A horizon line does the work of a floor. A figure placed off-centre does the work of a load-bearing column, quietly organising everything around it. Negative space — something I once thought of purely as "the sky" or "the water" — I now think of the way I once thought about a courtyard: not empty, but doing the specific job of giving everything else room to be seen clearly.

There's a principle from architecture school I still carry into every piece I start: form follows feeling, before it follows anything else. In a building, that shows up as the way a low ceiling in an entryway makes the tall room beyond it feel more dramatic by contrast. In a painting, it shows up as the decision to leave three-quarters of a canvas in near-darkness so the one lit figure means something when you finally find them.

I don't think this crossover is unique to me. Every discipline that thinks seriously about space — architecture, painting, even the way a good garden is laid out — is really asking the same handful of questions about attention. Where do you want a stranger to look first? What do you want them to feel by the time they get there? What do you want to still be true about the experience after they've walked away?

I bring a compass and a straightedge to very few paintings these days. But I bring the thinking those tools taught me to every single one.