When a Painting Turns Into a Witness

Two new self portraits that make more sense seen together.

Love Letter From Paris
Not to Stay There. But to Integrate It.

This week, I hung a painting in my studio.

That may sound ordinary, uneventful—but for me, it felt ceremonial. Something in me had been waiting for this moment—not to prove anything, but to witness it.

It’s a self-portrait I painted this past June, just as my exhibition
Beyond the Veil: Narrative Portraits by Rick Beerhorst
was coming down.
Not one painting sold.
Paris was bright and untroubled.
I didn’t yet sense the storm that was forming.

The portrait is of me—barefoot, seated, holding a book, a white deer resting calmly beside me. Painted in my apartment on Rue des Tournelles, before everything changed. Before the night of blood and eviction. Before I found myself alone on the street, holding only my dignity.

At the time, I didn’t realize what I was painting.

Only now do I understand:

I had painted a moment of stillness
just before the storm.

For months, I could not look at it. It lived silently in a corner, face-in, like a guest I could not yet face.
Not because it reminded me of what I had lost—
but because it reminded me of what I had not yet become.

But this week,
in my studio on Boulevard Voltaire,
I lifted it back onto the wall.

Not to stay there.
But to integrate it.

Because this is what I’m learning:

We don’t heal by erasing the past.
We heal by giving it a place in the present.

Not to glorify it.
Not to dwell there.
Simply to include it.

That painting wasn’t a symbol of pain.
It became a witness of continuity.

It reminded me that even before the disruption,
there had already been strength.
Even before the violation, there had already been truth.
Even before the eviction, there had already been a home—
one that no one could take from me.

Above it, I hung another self-portrait.

Painted recently,
but lived much earlier.

It remembers Tuscany.
My year in solitude.
My bronzed skin, shaved head, silent evenings with the hills.
My apprenticeship to stillness.

The first portrait whispers: You didn’t know yet.
The second replies: But you were already becoming.

That is the story today.

I don’t hang the paintings to reflect on what happened.
I hang them because of what I understand now.

My life didn’t break.
It revealed how unbreakable it had already become.

So I hung the painting.

Not to stay there.
But to integrate it.

—

Paris keeps teaching me:
Wisdom is not what you’ve been through.
Wisdom is what you’ve integrated.

Thank you for walking alongside me, even quietly.
More soon—
from Paris,
where some paintings speak before I do.

—Rick