Hard Rock Hotel San Diego reached out and asked if I could paint live. I had never done a live painting before, so I said yes. I had just finished Lessons from the Ocean and felt like I was finally coming up for air. I mixed all of my paint before the event with absolutely no idea whether I had enough, prepared as much as I could, and showed up trusting that I would figure out the rest.

My friends came to support me, people gathered around while I painted, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I realized how grateful I was to be surrounded by people who could see beauty in what I was making while I was still making it.

It takes one to know one.

That became the idea behind the painting: Has anyone told you how beautiful you are? A reminder to the people standing around me, and eventually to whoever would stand in front of the finished piece.

The painting almost didn't end the way I intended. I covered it in resin, but the resin cured incorrectly. The night before my housewarming party, I was still in my studio at 1 a.m. sanding the entire surface down. A friend finally told me to stop trying to fix it, sand it to a matte finish, and deal with the resin another day.

So I did. Except I never re-resined it. I loved what the mistake left behind. The sanded surface softened the painting, and from the side, the remaining texture looks like tiny droplets of water. When light from my disco ball hits it, those droplets catch the light and scatter it across the room. What I thought I had ruined became one of my favorite parts of the piece.