Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Abstract Inquiry · 2023
Crooked Windows
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
The window that stopped pretending to be a rectangle — abstraction holding the view without the architecture.
Crooked Windows (2023) is a meditation on perspective — on how what we see is never quite what is, and how the structures we look through can distort, reveal, or even protect. Part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this 48 x 48 inch acrylic on canvas work invites the viewer to question the reliability of their own gaze.
The composition features angular lines and soft grids, painted over layers of weathered hues: storm gray, moss green, ochre, and quiet teal. Nothing aligns quite perfectly. Windows shift, bend, lean. Some open. Some don’t. It’s a painting about being inside and looking out — or being outside and trying to see in.
I created Crooked Windows while thinking about mental architecture — the frames we inherit or construct that shape how we understand reality. Sometimes they offer clarity. Other times, they skew. Either way, they frame everything.
This piece shares a conceptual dialogue with the work of Rachel Whiteread, particularly her architectural casts that reveal negative space and memory. Like Whiteread, I’m drawn to the idea of the unseen being just as present as the visible.
In Crooked Windows, distortion becomes language. The irregularity is not brokenness — it’s a deeper kind of truth. A reminder that what looks off may simply be a different kind of seeing.
As part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this painting suggests that liberation often begins not by breaking the frame, but by realizing the frame was never straight to begin with.
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
- Natural light preferred — the resin catches it and the color shifts through the day
- Daylight
- A painting about windows can live near one. Cobalt and phthalo green stay steady while citrine yellow brightens in afternoon light, and the raw canvas passages warm only slightly.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
Crooked Windows earns a 5 here because its five-by-five cobalt and citrine architecture rewards the unhurried, repeated looking that only a living room allows, the tilted frames reading differently from the sofa than from across the room.
Hotel lobby 4/5
The phthalo green and raw canvas passages carry enough visual weight to anchor a lobby wall without demanding a seated viewer, though the restlessness in those skewed forms may unsettle guests who need arrival to feel settled.
Details
- Size
- 5 × 5 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
- Abstract Inquiry
- Palette
- Cobalt · Raw Canvas · Citrine Yellow · Phthalo Green · Moss
- Weight
- About 45 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 8–12 weeks
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Sheaf
- Texture2
- Form4
- Colour range4
- Palette3
- Contrast3.3
- Abstraction Quotient3
