Treegazing: Message from the NorthWest Wind

2016

There is a moment, just before waking from certain dreams, when every person you have ever known crowds into a single impossible room. This painting lives in that moment. The figures do not so much occupy space as emerge from it—materializing from burnt umber depths like memories surfacing unbidden. A winged figure descends bearing what might be deliverance or judgment; below, the multitude neither flees nor welcomes, but simply exists in the suspended animation of souls awaiting verdict. The crosses scattered throughout speak to suffering both chosen and imposed, while the nude forms stripped of all social armor reveal the fundamental equality of human vulnerability. What strikes most deeply is the absence of hierarchy in this spiritual tumult—saints and sinners share the same trembling flesh tones, the same uncertain gestures. The painter has given us not the afterlife of doctrine but the afterlife of feeling: that crowded, burning, beautiful confusion where everything we have loved and feared finally shares the same frame. The blue-gray coolness of certain figures offers no escape, only contrast—proof that even in fire, something remains that fire cannot touch.

Type

Original

Framing

Unframed