The Shape of Energy

Mixed-media paintings about line, layers, and what a feeling looks like.

Acrylic Paint · Ink · Graphite · Charcoal · Oil Stick · Symbolic Expression

CONTEXT

My paintings start with a feeling, before there’s a picture. It’s something with momentum that wants a shape before I know what it is, and I paint to find out.

I’ve always paid attention to how a line behaves: how it stretches, snaps, trembles or fades. In these paintings the lines carry most of the charge. Forms come out of them the way weather comes out of pressure, slowly and then all at once. The work squashes, swirls and distorts because that’s how a feeling moves when I’m in it.

APPROACH

I use mixed media because each material behaves differently, and I want all of them in the room. Ink commits. Graphite takes its time. Acrylic dries fast and blooms where it wants. Oil stick stays soft for days and smears into everything. Charcoal erases but never quite disappears.

Half of a painting is how the materials respond to me, and the other half is how they ignore me.

I also think in symbols: thresholds, moons, hands, vessels, cycles. They’re the words I use for things I can’t say yet.

OUTCOME

Mixed media keeps a record. Each layer remembers the one under it, so a finished painting is a timeline of decisions, reversals and accidents. What I’m trying to paint is energy: momentum, tension, release, memory. The surreal parts are the parts of a feeling you don’t usually get to see.

RELATED WORK

The full collection.