It is not a face you see clearly. It is a face you remember having seen — in a dream, in a church fresco half-erased by time, in the plaster of an old house at noon.
The paint itself is the subject. Thick, troweled, almost edible — encaustic-like layers of ochre and olive built up and then scraped back, revealing a ghostly underpainting of sage and bone. In the center, a countenance barely coalesces: two eyes, unfocused and luminous, one catching more light than the other as if turned toward a window that exists outside the canvas. The nose is a single, quiet vertical ridge. The mouth, a soft indentation — not speaking, not closed in judgment, just being.
There is no hard edge anywhere. The face dissolves into its own ground, the background of mossy verdigris and warm sand folding back into cheek and forehead. You cannot tell where figure ends and field begins. That dissolution is the whole point. It is a painting about presence that is almost absence — about how a person lingers after they have left the room, about memory as texture.
In certain light the golds glow — a honeyed, antiqued gold that feels sacred rather than decorative, like gilding worn thin by centuries of touch. In shadow it goes quiet, nearly monochrome, a meditation stone.
It does not command a room. It stills it. It asks you to lower your voice.
Medium: Encaustic and heavy impasto oil over textured gesso on paper, float-mounted on natural Belgian linen
Palette: Celadon, sage, green moss, malachite white, honey ochre, acid gold, apricot
Dimensions: 29.5 × 37.5 × 3
It is not a face you see clearly. It is a face you remember having seen — in a dream, in a church fresco half-erased by time, in the plaster of an old house at noon.
The paint itself is the subject. Thick, troweled, almost edible — encaustic-like layers of ochre and olive built up and then scraped back, revealing a ghostly underpainting of sage and bone. In the center, a countenance barely coalesces: two eyes, unfocused and luminous, one catching more light than the other as if turned toward a window that exists outside the canvas. The nose is a single, quiet vertical ridge. The mouth, a soft indentation — not speaking, not closed in judgment, just being.
There is no hard edge anywhere. The face dissolves into its own ground, the background of mossy verdigris and warm sand folding back into cheek and forehead. You cannot tell where figure ends and field begins. That dissolution is the whole point. It is a painting about presence that is almost absence — about how a person lingers after they have left the room, about memory as texture.
In certain light the golds glow — a honeyed, antiqued gold that feels sacred rather than decorative, like gilding worn thin by centuries of touch. In shadow it goes quiet, nearly monochrome, a meditation stone.
It does not command a room. It stills it. It asks you to lower your voice.
Medium: Encaustic and heavy impasto oil over textured gesso on paper, float-mounted on natural Belgian linen
Palette: Celadon, sage, green moss, malachite white, honey ochre, acid gold, apricot
Dimensions: 29.5 × 37.5 × 3