Highways, highrise and hot Coffee.

When I moved to Houston, a few things captured my imagination.

First, the Transco Tower (now Williams Tower). Nothing in my small-town upbringing had prepared me for a building that striking — and there always seemed to be helicopters buzzing around it. Then the freeways: miles of layered concrete that felt like the veins and arteries of a vast urban organism.

I drank a lot of coffee, and when I wasn't working, shared a tiny apartment with the biggest cockroaches I'd ever seen. I was horrified by their size and brazenness.

These paintings are about my arrival — the exhilaration and disorientation of scale. Buildings, highways, insects. I was born in Canyon. But I was forged in Houston. So were these paintings.