I can claim to be a hipster about a few different, mostly very un-hipsterish things. I was friendly with Adriene Mishler back when she was running free yoga classes in the lobby of Salvage Vanguard Theater. I actually wrote a blog post in 2010 recommending Ben Rector, a full twelve years before he collaborated with Snoop Dogg (really). 

But my favorite “knew ‘em before they were big” example is Kristin Moore, a painter whom I met at the East Austin Studio Tour five years ago. Something about her little Instagrammy square panels grabbed me, and I bought one in 2018. A few months later I bought a second one that I mailed to Kiki, so she could visit Waffle House whenever she wanted. Reuniting the siblings was a special treat upon moving to Amsterdam.

Now, I don’t know anything about art—although, to quote “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” nobody knows anything about art. Kristin’s Artist Statement does a much better job than me at describing what her work is “really about.” But besides evoking wanderlust and so forth, the visual juxtapositions of endless soaring skies over vanilla retail buildings—all of it, both majestic and mundane, rendered in painstaking detail—feels supremely American. Which means that, now that I live abroad, I appreciate it even more. And quite apart from “stirring the soul” or whatever art is supposed to do, it’s also just super well-made—have you ever tried blending acrylics?

In the few years since I bought those paintings, Kiki and I were lucky enough to become friends with Kristin. In the same period, Kristin went from selling ten-inch panels on home-studio tours to four-foot panels in galleries from Venice, California to Venice, Italy. When the chance came to commission a big painting of my own, I jumped at it. We reserved a spot on Kristin’s calendar, and even got to brainstorm in person when she and her husband Kyle passed through Amsterdam. Next we sent her a vision board to work from, which was a lot of fun to collaborate on.

Based on the vision board, Kristin sent us a couple of digital mockups that we were instantly smitten with. She got to work, and a few weeks later sent us a photo of the finished product, all 36×36″ of it. When we visited Texas in June, we drove up to Dallas and picked it up in a giant crate that barely squeezed into our rental car.

The crate was so well secured that our plan was not to even open it until we were back in Holland, so for the remainder of our Texas trip we had our very own Ark of the Covenant lurking in the corner. But that plan went out the window at the Austin airport, where the crate was too big for the X-ray machine. So I had to open it for inspection—18 screws extracted by hand, right on the floor of the ABIA lobby—then screw it shut again. I literally texted Kristin that this was our glitch for the trip. LOLLLLL

Then Kiki had a medical emergency just as our plane was taxiing, and they pulled the crate off the plane along with us. With Kiki headed to the hospital I was in no position to take it back, so I gave my blessing for the airline to declare it “lost” (I was looking right at it!) and make its own way to Amsterdam. This was, to put it very mildly, a nerve-wracking decision. You’ve probably heard about the lost-luggage problem at airports across the globe. For a good week it was somewhere in purgatory, with a couple of friends (thanks to J and Chuy in particular!) offering to pull strings to find it again.

Finally on Saturday the 16th I got a text that the crate had arrived at Schiphol. The very next day I got a surprise call that it would be at our door in less than five minutes. (Delivered from the airport for free! Lost luggage has its perks.) We hauled it up the stairs, removed the 18 screws again (with a screw gun this time) and then—twelve days after we got back to Amsterdam, and almost three weeks after we first took delivery—we finally saw it in person.

We love it, of course. It’s clearly a Kristin Moore, but it’s also very personal: the Tacodeli you’re looking at is the one near my house in Austin, and the chemtrail in the sky is pointed towards Amsterdam. The one thing that this photo can’t possibly convey is the size of it—like a Mark Rothko, it swallows you up when you’re standing in front of it. In the sunlight it positively glows. I feel like I have a window back to Austin, and that’s priceless.