Finished painting essay -- August, 2026
For a while now, I’ve been noticing smiley faces everywhere. The really simple ones, with two circular shapes for eyes and a long curved line for the mouth. I see them painted on the sidewalks in Echo Park, drawn on a railing in Hawaii, smudged on a glass display case at Pasadena City College, and one made of sticks and spider webs on the side of my partner’s apartment building.
I’ve been trying to take photos of the ones I encounter in the world. I don’t remember when I started this, especially because I did not create a specific folder for them in my phone, which means they’re almost impossible to find. But if I had to guess, I’m sure it was a very simple moment where I was walking with more awareness and had that gut feeling telling me to take a photo. At some point, I noticed I was looking for them. Then I noticed they were everywhere.
The painting I just finished came out of that noticing.
From across the room, the painting reads as a simple smiley face, much like the drawings of them I find in the world. The one I made is light blue on a darker blue rectangular field. This is the kind of face I’d draw on a fogged-up window with my finger. Simple, familiar, child-like, kind of dumb.
Like with a lot of my work, up close, everything changes. The surface is made up of hundreds (maybe thousands) of tiny marks: circles inside circles, ringed with color, layered on top of paint I applied years ago and then buried. Whole sections of collaged paper are underneath there somewhere, mostly invisible now. Patterns I loved at one point that didn’t make it.
I believe the painting technically took me a few years to complete, though I didn’t work on it consistently for most of them. It sat in the studio for months at a time. I’d walk past it, notice something I wanted to try, sometimes make a move, sometimes not, take it off the wall, put it back up, rinse and repeat. This is how a lot of my paintings get made. I probably have fifty or more of them in progress at any given moment. Some get my attention for a week or a month, and then sit around for a year. This is pretty typical for me.
This one came back with real focus in the last six months or so. My vision for it sharpened. The face emerged. Every mark I’d made years prior was still there, doing structural work, but the surface wanted to be more simple than I’d initially imagined.
I’ve been thinking about why I keep noticing smiley faces. Most feel like the kind of graffiti a bored kid draws with a Sharpie. But they all pass something forward. Someone took the time to make the mark, and I may be wrong here, but I like to think that they’re meant to pass a message of positivity along. If I had to guess, I’m sure most strangers walk past without seeing them. Though, other times, people may see them and smile back.
The world is full of mirrors like that.
I did a little research to be able to name the thing that was happening to me. Frequency illusion— once your brain marks something as worth noticing, it filters it up from the noise. I wasn’t seeing more of them. I was just seeing them. I think that’s important to note. Paying attention doesn’t add anything to the world. It allows more of what’s already there through.
Happiness also works like that. It’s contagious in a quiet way. I catch it from people without noticing they gave it to me. Sometimes, if I’m paying attention, I can give it back.
I always have so many aspirations for a finished painting. I want them to be beautiful, and weird, and quiet and loud— to hold so much and be able to communicate it all in a language people will feel and understand. As usual, I hope this painting does that too, quietly, in the way of a simple grin.
The painting is below. Underneath is a small grid of the smiley faces I’ve been collecting, taken on walks and trips and days I was more open to seeing them.
