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Black & White · 2024
Canvas in Canvas
In a private collection
The painting about itself — black and white holding the recursive question of what the canvas means before it becomes anything.
“Canvas in Canvas' balances chaos and clarity, each stroke a step through abstraction’s wild terrain.”
Canvas in Canvas (2024) is a study in introspection — a painting that reflects on painting itself. At 72 x 72 inches, this large-scale black and white acrylic work is part of the Black and White Collection, where constraint gives rise to depth. The composition features a subtly framed square, nested within the larger canvas, bordered by barely-there lines and layered tonal shifts.
The surface is rich in nuance: matte blacks, smoky grays, and bright whites applied in glazes and scumbled textures that reward slow looking. The nested “inner canvas” appears simultaneously foregrounded and receding — like a memory, a window, or a forgotten mirror.
I created Canvas in Canvas as a meditation on framing: what we choose to highlight, to hide, to repeat. It's a gesture toward self-reference, an echo of artistic process. There’s something deeply quiet about this painting — not empty, but open.
This work draws inspiration from Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, whose restrained palettes conceal emotional and philosophical intensity. Like them, I’m interested in the border between the visible and the sensed — how a single edge or shift in tone can invite presence.
In a world of color and noise, Canvas in Canvas offers a retreat — a space to reflect, reframe, and simply be.
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 8 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 9 ft or more
- Light
- Any lighting — monochrome palette is lighting-agnostic
- Daylight
- Graphite and charcoal won't shift color in any light, but the contrast is low, and direct Arizona sun can wash the grays together. Indirect or angled light keeps the nested frame readable.
Lives best in
Office 5/5
The monochrome palette and self-referential structure reward peripheral attention without demanding it, which is exactly the contract a working office needs from its walls.
Boardroom 5/5
Canvas in Canvas earns its place at the head of a conference table, where a painting that turns its own process into subject matter flatters the kind of thinking that happens there.
Details
- Size
- 5 × 6 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Year
- 2024
- Collection
- Black & White
- Palette
- Graphite Black · Charcoal Gray · Charcoal
- Weight
- About 45 lb
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Sprig
- Texture4
- Form3
- Colour range1
- Palette5
- Contrast1.7
- Abstraction Quotient3.5
