Matthew Gray Gubler didn't want to show me his paintings. Since his own house was being renovated, the Criminal Minds actor was staying at his friend's house in Los Angeles; I asked if he'd been painting there.

"Nothing good, to be honest," he said, sitting in the shade in slippers. "I have nothing — nothing worth showing here, anyway, for sure."

"Can I see it anyway?" I said.

"It's so bad. I can't," he said. "Because I always worry about, not worry, but my nightmare is making someone see something in the flesh, and then making them, like, they feel some responsibility to pretend to like it. Like, 'Ohh.' Like you would be like this: I'd be like, 'Oh, here!' and you'd go like, 'Oh, that's great.' On the internet, it's this safe space where I can put it up and people can click on it or not. I don't have to be in the same room as them pretending to like it, so I very rarely show people things, and I've made the mistake — like, some people misinterpret my style of painting as offensive, and I've had instances where I've painted beautiful portraits for, like, a girlfriend or someone, and they're just like, they look at it with a grimace and they're like, 'This is terrible. I don't look like this, and you're awful, and you must hate me.' And I'm crushed by it, so I kind of am weird about being in the room when it's shown."

"Is my portrait up there?" I joked.

"It is," he said. His straight face is marvelous.

"OK. What if I looked at it and you weren't in the room?"

"Maybe, here's what I'll do. Let me think. How about this. I'll go up to that window." He pointed to a window in the house. "I'll open the window and I'll hold something out and I'll look away, and you (look) from here, and then I'll give it like, 'one-one-hundred, two,' like, four beats."

"OK," I said, which is how he came to be shouting down at me from a second-story window covered in vines, holding out his paintings and counting to four or five before he pulled them back inside.

And then when he came back down the steps, he was holding two paintings, which he placed on the table between us. He said he didn't see the creepiness of the blurred and long-fingered figures he paints, in part because he has a peculiar aesthetic sensibility.

"This is my friend Paget; she's an actress," he said, gesturing to the painting with the words "Sleepy Ballerina." "This, to me, is like, the most beautiful photo of her, or picture of her, but again, I guess it is kind of creepy, because the watercolors make it smudged."

"It's the fingers," I suggested, looking at the long, swollen fingers. "Maybe the eyes." (Swollen, purple.)