Economics of Color and Line

“Economics' balances chaos and clarity, each stroke a step through abstraction’s wild terrain.”

Economics (2024) is a structural abstraction — a painting that suggests systems, scarcity, and accumulation through grids, rupture, and material tension. Made in acrylic and epoxy on a 72 x 48 inch canvas, this work from the Playful Abstraction collection visualizes invisible forces: pressure, imbalance, circulation.

The composition is framed by loosely drawn verticals and horizontals — a distorted grid overlaid by scraped textures and fractured blocks of color. Black, rust, gold, and raw canvas dominate, giving the painting a palette of decay and accumulation. Thin lines of gold leaf and resin catch the light in a way that feels both seductive and alarming — like the glitter of wealth atop a crumbling structure.

I created Economics after months of reading and thinking about systems — not just financial, but emotional, ecological, cultural. What happens when systems crack? When exchange becomes extraction?

The painting holds tension — not through narrative, but through architecture and gesture. There’s a quiet violence in it. And yet, also rhythm. A strange harmony.

This piece shares lineage with Mark Bradford, whose urban abstractions turn economic and social realities into form. Like Bradford, I use layering and surface as language.

Economics asks you to look, and then look again. To feel structure — and its failure — beneath your feet.