There is a particular kind of discovery that doesn’t announce itself.

Last fall I began hosting monthly abstract art workshops here in my studio. The second one was on color field painting — a technique I had never actually worked in myself. I taught what I understood of it. And then, when everyone left, I was alone with the canvas and the paint and a question I hadn’t expected: what would I do with this?

I started playing.

On raw canvas, color moves in ways you cannot fully control and would not want to. It migrates. It pools. It makes quiet decisions at the edge of your intention — shadows appear where two colors meet, new combinations surface that you never mixed, never planned. I would begin a canvas and then simply wait. Watch it dry. Come back the next day, or not for a week. Sometimes what I found when I returned was already complete. Sometimes a month or two later a canvas would call me back — not finished after all, it turned out, just resting.

And then I would go in with my own hand. My marks layered over the field that had already formed on its own. Two languages in one painting. Neither what I would have made alone.

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Open Field No. 5 — Horizon is one of those works. What began as color finding its own way across raw canvas in the fall became, over many months, this — coral blooming into sage, drips tracing the ground line, white marks that arrived like punctuation at the end of a long thought. It brought me somewhere new in my work. I’m still finding out exactly where.

This is what a year of honest experimentation gives you. Not a new style. A deeper conversation with the work itself. And paintings that carry the whole story — including the part where I didn’t know what I was doing yet.

The Summer Studio Sale is open through Labor Day.

Small works from $100. Statement pieces at 40–50% off studio price.

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Until next time,

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