Miles has been told countless times that he is not the centre of the universe — but he has a sneaky suspicion he actually might be. He is all energy, all urgency, all spark. It’s as if he has petrol in his veins, and death keeps glancing at him from the rear-view mirror while he speeds through life without ever easing off the accelerator.
People sometimes mistake him for a hipster — the rolled-up hat, the swagger, the youthful approach to everything. It’s easy to think he believes he’s too cool for school. But really, he’s just too impatient to stay put in a school bench. There’s so much to learn about life, and the best way to do it, in his opinion, is to live it. Not study it.
Miles is an untamed force — someone who simply doesn’t know how to slow down. He tries sometimes, mostly for his dear mother’s sake, but trouble seems to gravitate toward him as if he were a magnet. He never means to hurt anybody. Truly, he doesn’t. But he’s urgently aware he won’t be here forever, so he acts accordingly: he lives and loves loud, fast, and fiercely — and some might get in the way. Every moment is taken at full throttle, without much consideration for those around him. It’s as if oxygen might fail him should he choose to stop for even a second.
When I started painting his portrait, I didn’t know where I was going. But slowly and surely he emerged from a thought that kept returning to me:
Some people live fast not because they’re reckless, but because they’re terrified life might slip out from under them if they pause.
Miles carries that fear like fuel.
Painting him, I tried to catch movement inside stillness — the heat, the recklessness, the charm, the restless hunger that refuses to sit still long enough to be understood. I wanted his expression to hold that contradiction: young, bold and confident on the surface, yet shadowed by a fragility that only reveals itself in the split second between impulse and consequence.
Some characters are whispers. Not Miles.
In my head he’s a flare — bright, fleeting, and impossible to ignore.
Miles — finished in February 2023 — is one of my favourite explorations of human velocity.
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