Enlightened, 2020

The first of a series of larger paintings I have done in the past year. I wanted to move back to canvas and go bigger on my scale. I decided to showcase my ongoing obsession with rainbows and see how this could play out at a human scale– the piece is 5 ft tall, which is only slightly shorter than me. I wanted to keep this one loose while still playing with the motif of the rainbow, dissonant and unexpected color relationships, and mark-making. This piece also distills the push-pull and drama of my fascination with 3-dimensional versus 2-dimensional spaces. A "shadow" emerges from the rainbow begging the question of what kind of space it lives in, while simultaneously eschewing any notion of actual illusionism by rendering the shadow in a lighter tone, instead of the expected darker tone of a typical shadow. With works like these I want to play with the viewers' perception and upend ideas of what colors emerge or recede in spite of the viewers' expectation.