ETHER, 2023

Each painting in this series is a quarrel with itself, a slow circling between making and unmaking. The work runs on a cycle: build, erase, begin again. It carries the quiet rigor of Agnes Martin, the vulnerable matter‑of‑factness of Eva Hesse, the poured and falling marks of Pat Steir, the steady persistence of Margaret Shirley. Their ways of working—methodical, tender, severe—stand behind the paintings like older sisters at the edge of the studio. The surfaces also owe something to Gerhard Richter, James Lavadour, and Stephen Hayes, to their stubborn dragging and scraping of pigment across ground, and to the inward, obsessive drawing of Wes Mills, D. E. May, and Vija Celmins, where the smallest mark becomes a field.

The work begins with a printed image sealed behind glass, a fixed thing, an anchor. Then the anchor is attacked. Acid eats at the surface. The image clouds, fractures, dissolves. Over this wounded ground, thin skins of paint and lines of text are laid down and then taken back, wiped, scoured, buried under the next veil. The painting lives by this repetition. Layer follows layer; statement follows erasure. The piece is finished not when it is whole, but when the cycle of injury and repair comes to a kind of earned silence.

Before any brush lifts, a loose scaffolding is set in place: the placement of the text lines, the count of layers, the small constellation of colors allowed to enter. These limits are not fences but trellises. Within them the work can climb and lean and sometimes break. Constraint becomes a way of slipping the leash; by narrowing the choices, the painting is freed to speak more clearly in the few available tones. The rules hold steady; the weather of the hand does not.

These paintings continue an older search: to move toward what cannot be named using only pigment, pressure, and time. They are meant less to explain than to stir a particular feeling in the viewer, one that edges close to the unseen and then backs away. Action is central, but it is action destined for erasure; every gesture is made under the knowledge that it may not remain. This back‑and‑forth—doing and undoing, color laid down and then scraped off, noise raised and then muted—creates a field where presence and absence lean hard against one another.

The series is stitched from many sources: paintings and cathedrals, poems and prayer. Richter’s Grey Paintings stand behind it with their austere, fogged surfaces, as do Agnes Martin’s desert works, where lines barely break the air. The stained glass of Chartres offers another model: color as light made dense, theology poured through sand and fire and lead. In poetry, Paul Celan’s fractured, precise language—his lifelong attempt to speak what has barely survived—runs parallel to this practice of layering and erasure, of saying and then unsaying.

Hindu philosophy, with its insistence on vibration and light moving through the body, undergirds the gestures themselves. The arm swings, the wrist turns, the brush lands; the mark is what remains when the movement is gone. The trace is the only proof of the event, the fossil of a vanished motion. In the end, these paintings are built to invite a pause—a small clearing in the day where the eye can rest and the heart can tilt open. They aim, quietly, toward love: not as sentiment, but as the binding force that holds the broken pieces together and keeps them from flying apart.