There is no shortcut through the hard thing. Every artist and every person doing serious inner work knows this eventually. The bright version of yourself, the one you performed so convincingly for so long, has to be set down before you can find out what's underneath it.
This painting holds the moment of that choice. Not the resolution. The choice to keep going deeper even knowing it gets darker before it gets lighter. The dark mass that presses down from the top of the canvas is not the enemy. It is the invitation.
Below it, something insists on existing. Orange, pink, yellow, pushing up through layers of blue and green, not triumphant yet, but present. Stubborn. Alive.
The Only Way Out Is Through is built from the most physically varied surface in the Wild collection. The Payne's Grey mass at the top is the most heavily worked area of paint in any of these paintings, multiple passes pressed into each other until the surface has genuine topography, visibly thicker than the surrounding field with drips running downward into the mid-ground, evidence of the paint's weight and the velocity of its application. Below it, pink was laid in first, broad and soft, and over it the orange marks arrived in single decisive loaded strokes, fast enough that each one is complete in itself, not reworked. The yellow marks on the left are the most gestural of all, almost scratched into the surface. In the lower field, a blue-green secondary layer covers an earlier ground entirely, a deliberate burial rather than a revelation, the one place in the painting where a previous state is fully gone rather than partially visible. The painting's compositional argument is about threshold: the dark mass above does not descend and the warm marks below do not rise to meet it. They coexist at close range, unresolved, because resolution is not what this painting is about. The willingness to remain inside that tension is its subject and its formal achievement.
From the Wild collection, 2024. Featured in Curatory Magazine and ArtSeen Magazine.
From the artist's journal:
"What cannot be avoided by Artists or Spiritualists is going into the darkness. Facing the shadows, the secrets, the lies we've told on our path is the only way to let them go. This work explores the first steps from the bright and shiny world I thought myself to inhabit into the reality of my relationships, my work, my vision of my self worth. It is a choice to continue deeper into a space that will sure become darker in order to see the truth of what is possible. In order to emerge free from the bitter self judgement and comparison to an authentic freedom, a purposeful path, and a stable sovereignty."
There is no shortcut through the hard thing. Every artist and every person doing serious inner work knows this eventually. The bright version of yourself, the one you performed so convincingly for so long, has to be set down before you can find out what's underneath it.
This painting holds the moment of that choice. Not the resolution. The choice to keep going deeper even knowing it gets darker before it gets lighter. The dark mass that presses down from the top of the canvas is not the enemy. It is the invitation.
Below it, something insists on existing. Orange, pink, yellow, pushing up through layers of blue and green, not triumphant yet, but present. Stubborn. Alive.
The Only Way Out Is Through is built from the most physically varied surface in the Wild collection. The Payne's Grey mass at the top is the most heavily worked area of paint in any of these paintings, multiple passes pressed into each other until the surface has genuine topography, visibly thicker than the surrounding field with drips running downward into the mid-ground, evidence of the paint's weight and the velocity of its application. Below it, pink was laid in first, broad and soft, and over it the orange marks arrived in single decisive loaded strokes, fast enough that each one is complete in itself, not reworked. The yellow marks on the left are the most gestural of all, almost scratched into the surface. In the lower field, a blue-green secondary layer covers an earlier ground entirely, a deliberate burial rather than a revelation, the one place in the painting where a previous state is fully gone rather than partially visible. The painting's compositional argument is about threshold: the dark mass above does not descend and the warm marks below do not rise to meet it. They coexist at close range, unresolved, because resolution is not what this painting is about. The willingness to remain inside that tension is its subject and its formal achievement.
From the Wild collection, 2024. Featured in Curatory Magazine and ArtSeen Magazine.
From the artist's journal:
"What cannot be avoided by Artists or Spiritualists is going into the darkness. Facing the shadows, the secrets, the lies we've told on our path is the only way to let them go. This work explores the first steps from the bright and shiny world I thought myself to inhabit into the reality of my relationships, my work, my vision of my self worth. It is a choice to continue deeper into a space that will sure become darker in order to see the truth of what is possible. In order to emerge free from the bitter self judgement and comparison to an authentic freedom, a purposeful path, and a stable sovereignty."
