Someone asked me to paint their parents' kitchen. Not a portrait, not a landscape, just the kitchen where they grew up. I almost said no. Kitchens are hard, all those surfaces, chrome, the light fights you. And the reference photo they sent was terrible, taken on a phone in the evening, everything yellow.

But they wrote me a long email about their mother cooking in that room, about the afternoon light coming through the little window, and I caved. I should trust that instinct more often.

What saved me was that I ended up painting it almost from memory of what a kitchen like that feels like. The photo was only a scaffold. I moved the light around, made it morning, put a bowl of apricots on the counter that wasn't in the photograph at all.

She cried when she picked it up. Her husband filmed her. There is a video of a grown woman crying over a painting of her mother's kitchen and it is the most honest thing I've seen in months. I kept the bowl of apricots in. She said her mother always had fruit out.

I keep thinking about what I almost said no to.