There are moments when someone else's words reach past everything you've built to protect yourself and land somewhere you forgot existed.
That's what this painting holds. Someone spoke and something broke open, not gently. The cry that came up carried everything at once: frustration at the time lost, rage at how completely I had made myself small, and underneath all of it, a joy so sharp it was almost grief. The joy of recognizing myself again.
Activation holds the precise energy of that instant. At 30"×40", this painting has physical presence. It doesn't ask to be looked at quietly. It asks you to remember the last time something woke you up.
The surface of Activation records a conversation rather than a confrontation. Payne's Grey, a deep blue that reads as near-black at full saturation, is applied over an initial yellow ground, and then yellow comes back over the Payne's Grey in a second pass. The result is not a dark center from which gold escapes but a layered negotiation between the two, each colour asserting itself over the other in sequence. The Payne's Grey does not extinguish the yellow beneath it and the yellow does not simply cover the grey. They hold each other's history. Radiating outward from this core, the ochre and warm cream strokes move in all directions with the velocity of a body in motion, fast and unguarded, while the cooler atmospheric field above was laid in with broader, less pressured strokes, the stillness the painting was painted against. A single blue mark at the upper left was made and left alone, untouched by subsequent passes, a moment of restraint in an otherwise fully released surface. At the very base, green from a previous layer surfaces through the warm field, a reminder that this painting has a history the viewer can sense but not fully recover. What Activation makes visible is not the moment of awakening but its actual structure: not a single flash but a back and forth, suppression and insistence, each pass of paint answering the last.
From the Wild collection, 2024.
From the artist's journal:
"Her words awoken something within me, a spark that lit the still quiet dullness where I had dwelled for far too long. I was hit with a sudden clarity that I chose to stand still, to be stuck, to shrink myself into the corner rather than stand tall and proud in my power. She spoke and I heard a part of myself that was aching to be released. I felt a cry of frustration rising from the depths, a sadness for the time lost, a rage that I had allowed such a transformation, a joy that I was finally remembering the freedom, the power, the lightness of being fully me."
There are moments when someone else's words reach past everything you've built to protect yourself and land somewhere you forgot existed.
That's what this painting holds. Someone spoke and something broke open, not gently. The cry that came up carried everything at once: frustration at the time lost, rage at how completely I had made myself small, and underneath all of it, a joy so sharp it was almost grief. The joy of recognizing myself again.
Activation holds the precise energy of that instant. At 30"×40", this painting has physical presence. It doesn't ask to be looked at quietly. It asks you to remember the last time something woke you up.
The surface of Activation records a conversation rather than a confrontation. Payne's Grey, a deep blue that reads as near-black at full saturation, is applied over an initial yellow ground, and then yellow comes back over the Payne's Grey in a second pass. The result is not a dark center from which gold escapes but a layered negotiation between the two, each colour asserting itself over the other in sequence. The Payne's Grey does not extinguish the yellow beneath it and the yellow does not simply cover the grey. They hold each other's history. Radiating outward from this core, the ochre and warm cream strokes move in all directions with the velocity of a body in motion, fast and unguarded, while the cooler atmospheric field above was laid in with broader, less pressured strokes, the stillness the painting was painted against. A single blue mark at the upper left was made and left alone, untouched by subsequent passes, a moment of restraint in an otherwise fully released surface. At the very base, green from a previous layer surfaces through the warm field, a reminder that this painting has a history the viewer can sense but not fully recover. What Activation makes visible is not the moment of awakening but its actual structure: not a single flash but a back and forth, suppression and insistence, each pass of paint answering the last.
From the Wild collection, 2024.
From the artist's journal:
"Her words awoken something within me, a spark that lit the still quiet dullness where I had dwelled for far too long. I was hit with a sudden clarity that I chose to stand still, to be stuck, to shrink myself into the corner rather than stand tall and proud in my power. She spoke and I heard a part of myself that was aching to be released. I felt a cry of frustration rising from the depths, a sadness for the time lost, a rage that I had allowed such a transformation, a joy that I was finally remembering the freedom, the power, the lightness of being fully me."
