“Breaking Through the Protective Circle”
24″ x 36″
acrylic on stretched canvas

Here’s one of my first paintings of the year 2013. I’ll tell you this: as I was working on this painting I thought it was an absolute mess. Look at that turquoise, and magenta. All those swirling lines. But there was something about it that made me keep going, and then stop with a feeling of certainty that it was finished. I didn’t think it was any good, mind you, but sometimes a painting has to breath for a while to really open up.

There is something that works here. A very strange balance of colors that feel like maybe this is their first time meeting each other and they aren’t quite sure they’re supposed to be here. Maybe they’re feeling a little naughty about it, even. The more I look at it the more I like it. I especially like the pale yellow in the middle left and how it has those contrasting pools of dark grey and how those mirror the pools of bright turquoise with magenta specks in the area of pale yellow in the middle right. The composition evokes a ring, an ethereal ring with the viewer in the center. Yellow-Grey, Black-White-Magenta, and Yellow-Turqoise segments of the ring make the foreground of the image while a slightly muted, slightly blurred background composed largely of the same colors, minus the yellow, minus the white.

And still, you can find remnants of my old standby composition, the triangle. A pyramid whose apex is topped with a ghostly blob of flat magenta with three yellow dots. A composition evocative of “Distance Lens Enhancement,” a favorite of mine, but darker, more mysterious.

This painting has been sold to a collector who asked for a preview of work not yet posted to my website. Prints and skins are still available, though, via Bluecanvas:

http://www.bluecanvas.com/art-detail/482744