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Geometric Splendor · 2023
Circle Barbed Wire
In a private collection
Protection and confinement in the same gesture — the circle as the oldest form and the barbed wire as its most modern material.
Circle Barbed Wire (2023) is a painting about protection and pain — and how the two often intertwine. Part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, this 48 x 48 inch mixed media work brings together the visual elegance of symmetry with the sharpness of emotional boundaries.
The focal point is a loop — a circle that could be a crown, a fence, or a halo. But it’s not soft. It’s wrapped in barbed textures, etched and pulled into the surface like a memory that resists erasure. Around it, washes of steel blue, off-white, and rust echo the tension between beauty and harm.
I created Circle Barbed Wire while thinking about the emotional architecture we build — how we create shapes to guard our softness, and how those shapes often hurt. The circle, traditionally a symbol of wholeness, becomes a barrier here. Complete, but untouchable.
This piece aligns with the spirit of Louise Bourgeois, whose forms are both delicate and dangerous — holding trauma in tactile, intimate materials. Like Bourgeois, I’m drawn to contradictions: comfort and threat, roundness and rupture.
The painting isn’t about violence. It’s about resilience. About what it takes to hold space for oneself when the world feels sharp.
As part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, Circle Barbed Wire stands as both shield and offering — a visual mantra for boundaries that protect, even when they leave a mark.
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 5 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 8 ft or more
- Light
- Any lighting — geometric structure holds in all conditions
- Daylight
- Crimson and forest green balance each other, so the painting shifts only slightly through the day; late sun warms the crimson first. Side light brings up the textured edges of the wire.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
Circle Barbed Wire earns its place in a living room because the four-foot crimson and forest green tension it carries rewards the sustained, unhurried looking that only a home allows.
Hotel lobby 4/5
The geometric barbed perimeter reads immediately from across a lobby, giving arriving guests a single strong focal point without demanding the close reading its bone shadow texture actually repays.
Details
- Size
- 4 × 4 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Finish
- Epoxy over acrylic. The resin lifts the color off the canvas and holds it forward, so the surface deepens as the light moves across the room.
- Year
- 2023
- Collection
- Geometric Splendor
- Palette
- Crimson · Forest Green · Bone Shadow
- Weight
- About 22 lb
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Corona
- Texture4
- Form4
- Colour range3
- Palette3.5
- Contrast3.2
- Abstraction Quotient4
