Straight On Till Morning (2025)
Straight On Till Morning borrows its title from Peter & Wendy, the original telling of the Peter Pan story. ‘Second to the right, and straight on till morning’ is a navigational phrase delivered as guidance through the stars to the far away, magical land of Neverland. In this series of new paintings, observation, memory, and imagination blend to create sparkling landscapes drawn from the spring and summer seasons of New England’s woods and waters. These lushly-colored landscapes, occasionally populated with creatures, reflect a sublime experience of nature that verges into the magical or dream-like. Across the works, the sun and its partner, the moon, feature as central motifs: as orienting figures that signal the surety of the passage of time reflected by natural cycles. The sun, or the morning light, transforms into a metaphor for a hopeful and guiding force.
As a frequent refrain exchanged between mentor and mentee in the studio, ‘straight on till morning’ became a short-hand for the rhythm, endurance, and grounding nature of a daily creative practice, an especially powerful activity when navigating difficult times.
Pitch (2023 - 2025)
Inspired by the many dead and bare trees seen while traveling up and down the highways of the Northeast this past summer, this series, titled Pitch, is an extension of my interest in the transitional times of sunset and sunrise. The central figure of the trees act as vessels for the reflected, colored light of the depicted, transitioning skies. This body of work represents an initial exploration of chromatic blacks — hues so dark they appear black. Pitch, by definition, is both a dark black, tar-like substance produced through burning, and a quality in music that makes possible the ability to distinguish sound as higher or lower in frequency. I associate how color in my work functions with how pitch might function in music, as an abstract language to build emotion and tone.
Sunset Seeking: Psychedelic Color and Light in the Landscape (2023)
Sunset Seeking is a series of painted and ceramic works that locate the natural world as a realm of possibility: as a source of transformative encounters that generate feeling and awe, positioning the magical within the observable. Like the light that creates the many colors seen during a sunset, a simultaneous experience of oscillating color as light and light as color is psychedelic. A psychedelic use of prismatic light and spectral, ‘rainbow’ coloring in combination with landscape subjects becomes a visual strategy to give form to feelings of awe to reinforce a feeling that life is good and worth living.
Installation Documentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art @ MECA&D by Art Archival / Joel Tsui