We learn early to edit ourselves. To lead with the parts that will be well received and tuck the rest away somewhere no one will find it. We become so practiced at the performance that we forget what we hid and why, only that it felt safer to keep it out of sight.
This painting asks what we lost in that exchange. Not just personally but collectively. What if the things we deemed unacceptable, too loud, too strange, too much, too honest, are precisely the things the world needed from us? What if the gifts we buried are the ones that would have changed something?
Stop Hiding Your Gifts is oriented in landscape, 36"×48", and the horizontal format matters. The composition doesn't stack suppression over emergence the way the vertical works in this collection do. Here the two states exist side by side, grey and white on the left, yellow and gold on the right, neither above the other, neither winning. The question the painting poses is spatial as much as it is emotional.
Before any paint was applied, gold leaf was laid onto the canvas. It sits beneath everything, beneath the black, beneath the yellow, beneath the grey. In places it peeks through where the paint above it is thin or broken. In others it gives the surface a texture you sense before you see it. The black in the lower left is the most heavily loaded paint on the canvas, dense and physical, and yet the gold persists beneath it. The looping grey marks cross from their own territory into the yellow field without permission, and the yellow doesn't retreat. Murky greens emerge where black and yellow meet at the boundary, the colour of things that happen when opposites refuse to stay separate. The formal argument is unambiguous: what is most valuable was there first. Everything painted over it is temporary. The gold was always underneath.
From the Wild collection, 2024.
From the artist's journal:
"We paint the version of ourselves that we think the world will best respond to, hiding away the things that we deem unacceptable. What if all the things we keep hidden are the things that bring us joy and fulfilment, security and self assurance, what if they move society towards what it is meant to become?"
We learn early to edit ourselves. To lead with the parts that will be well received and tuck the rest away somewhere no one will find it. We become so practiced at the performance that we forget what we hid and why, only that it felt safer to keep it out of sight.
This painting asks what we lost in that exchange. Not just personally but collectively. What if the things we deemed unacceptable, too loud, too strange, too much, too honest, are precisely the things the world needed from us? What if the gifts we buried are the ones that would have changed something?
Stop Hiding Your Gifts is oriented in landscape, 36"×48", and the horizontal format matters. The composition doesn't stack suppression over emergence the way the vertical works in this collection do. Here the two states exist side by side, grey and white on the left, yellow and gold on the right, neither above the other, neither winning. The question the painting poses is spatial as much as it is emotional.
Before any paint was applied, gold leaf was laid onto the canvas. It sits beneath everything, beneath the black, beneath the yellow, beneath the grey. In places it peeks through where the paint above it is thin or broken. In others it gives the surface a texture you sense before you see it. The black in the lower left is the most heavily loaded paint on the canvas, dense and physical, and yet the gold persists beneath it. The looping grey marks cross from their own territory into the yellow field without permission, and the yellow doesn't retreat. Murky greens emerge where black and yellow meet at the boundary, the colour of things that happen when opposites refuse to stay separate. The formal argument is unambiguous: what is most valuable was there first. Everything painted over it is temporary. The gold was always underneath.
From the Wild collection, 2024.
From the artist's journal:
"We paint the version of ourselves that we think the world will best respond to, hiding away the things that we deem unacceptable. What if all the things we keep hidden are the things that bring us joy and fulfilment, security and self assurance, what if they move society towards what it is meant to become?"
