Sylvia Plath didn't describe deep emotion as a gift or a burden. She described it as a fact. The only mode available. Even the absence of feeling experienced at full intensity.
Most people who move through the world this way spend considerable energy managing it, moderating it, translating it into something more acceptable to the rooms they enter. This painting doesn't do that.
Deep Emotions is the most direct chromatic statement in the Emergence collection. Orange occupies the canvas the way a strong feeling occupies a person completely, not dramatically, simply totally. Applied across the upper two thirds in broad sweeps of brush and palette knife, the field is not flat but alive with directional marks, the tool moving through the paint and leaving its trace. In places the palette knife cut through the wet orange to reveal lighter marks beneath, thin pale lines that read as drawing but are actually absence, the previous layer surfacing through the new one. A small passage of teal persists in the upper right and lower left where earlier paint was left deliberately uncovered, the history of the canvas visible at its edges.
Below the orange field the composition opens into a different register entirely. A magenta band sweeps horizontally across the left, bold and direct. A violet field beneath it holds its ground. Teal blocks anchor the far left in vertical forms. A peach column descends on the right, lighter than the orange surrounding it, the warmth of the upper field arriving in a softer form. Lavender and blush occupy the lower edge, the quietest notes in a painting that is otherwise unafraid of its own volume. A black pencil line traces a loose form near the upper centre of the orange field, the one mark made by a different instrument, drawing coexisting with paint without trying to contain it.
The formal argument is about coexistence rather than resolution. The orange does not overwhelm the violet and teal below it. They hold their own. Feeling completely, and everything still intact.
From the Emergence collection, 2025.
Inspired by:
"I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely." — Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath didn't describe deep emotion as a gift or a burden. She described it as a fact. The only mode available. Even the absence of feeling experienced at full intensity.
Most people who move through the world this way spend considerable energy managing it, moderating it, translating it into something more acceptable to the rooms they enter. This painting doesn't do that.
Deep Emotions is the most direct chromatic statement in the Emergence collection. Orange occupies the canvas the way a strong feeling occupies a person completely, not dramatically, simply totally. Applied across the upper two thirds in broad sweeps of brush and palette knife, the field is not flat but alive with directional marks, the tool moving through the paint and leaving its trace. In places the palette knife cut through the wet orange to reveal lighter marks beneath, thin pale lines that read as drawing but are actually absence, the previous layer surfacing through the new one. A small passage of teal persists in the upper right and lower left where earlier paint was left deliberately uncovered, the history of the canvas visible at its edges.
Below the orange field the composition opens into a different register entirely. A magenta band sweeps horizontally across the left, bold and direct. A violet field beneath it holds its ground. Teal blocks anchor the far left in vertical forms. A peach column descends on the right, lighter than the orange surrounding it, the warmth of the upper field arriving in a softer form. Lavender and blush occupy the lower edge, the quietest notes in a painting that is otherwise unafraid of its own volume. A black pencil line traces a loose form near the upper centre of the orange field, the one mark made by a different instrument, drawing coexisting with paint without trying to contain it.
The formal argument is about coexistence rather than resolution. The orange does not overwhelm the violet and teal below it. They hold their own. Feeling completely, and everything still intact.
From the Emergence collection, 2025.
Inspired by:
"I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely." — Sylvia Plath
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