This fall and winter, I’ve been returning to something essential—the kind of raw, visceral art-making that doesn’t ask permission. Working across mixed media including acrylics, Posca markers, and pastels, these pieces have become an expressive outlet during a season that demanded one.
There’s something both controlled and wild about this recent body of work. Each piece demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of color relationships, particularly in how iridescent pinks, purples, and blues achieve an almost luminous quality against deep, absorbing blacks. The technique is deliberately tactile—I’m building up substantial texture through confident mark-making, where each stroke functions both independently and as part of a larger optical blend.
There’s something both controlled and wild about this recent body of work. Each piece demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of color relationships, particularly in how iridescent pinks, purples, and blues achieve an almost luminous quality against deep, absorbing blacks. The technique is deliberately tactile—I’m building up substantial texture through confident mark-making, where each stroke functions both independently and as part of a larger optical blend.
What draws me to working on dark grounds is that phosphorescent quality you can create when building up light from darkness. It requires patience and a clear vision of value structure, but the payoff is genuine atmosphere and depth. Those gestural marks radiating across the surface aren’t just decorative—they create movement, they pulse with energy, they invite you into a space that feels both botanical and celestial.
The dynamic, gestural quality of these works reflects their purpose. They’re not polite. They have this visceral, immediate quality because they needed to exist exactly as they are—spontaneous, decisive, unapologetic. Whether working with the bold opacity of Posca markers or the scratchy, electric energy of pastels, each medium demands its own kind of commitment, its own conversation between control and chaos.
This is art as outlet, as necessary language, as proof that sometimes the most radiant things emerge from the deepest shadows.
