Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Ephemeral Atmosphere · 2021
Ghosts of ex-Girlfriends
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
The paintings made from atmospheric residue — the specific quality of memory that doesn't announce itself but changes the air.
Ghosts of ex-Girlfriends (2021) is a memory unraveling in layers. Part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 48 x 48 inch acrylic painting reflects on love, loss, and the echoes that linger long after presence has passed.
Painted in translucent layers and interrupted forms, the composition feels like a palimpsest — moments overwritten, erased, and bleeding through. Color washes of soft violet, pale pink, and spectral gray blend and blur, like the residue of intimacy fading from conscious memory.
The work does not mourn. It haunts. Its gestures are loose, almost accidental, as if each brushstroke is a flicker — a trace of something once vivid and now receding. Faces aren’t visible. But feelings are.
This painting finds resonance with the emotional abstractions of Tracey Emin, though less raw in confession. Like Emin, I’m less concerned with aesthetics and more with emotional imprint — how memory shapes perception, and how painting becomes a site of release.
The ghosts in Ghosts of ex-Girlfriends aren’t frightening. They’re familiar. Fleeting. Flecks of feeling that resurface when you’re not looking. The painting captures that sense of walking through a city and suddenly remembering a name, a scent, a fight. It’s intimate, but shared.
As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this work embraces impermanence — using abstraction to explore memory as texture, tone, and space.
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
- Natural light transforms this work — morning and evening light read differently
- Daylight
- Prussian blue and graphite black anchor it, so it holds steady through bright Arizona days. Morning and evening shift the carmine and dusty pink accents, which is part of how the painting remembers.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
Ghosts of ex-Girlfriends earns its place here because a living room is where people actually pause, and this four-by-four canvas of graphite, carmine, and dusty pink rewards exactly that kind of unguarded looking.
Bedroom 4/5
The rust and Prussian blue hold a charged stillness that suits a bedroom, but the carmine threads and the painting's emotional insistence mean some sleepers will find it too much to carry into the dark.
Details
- Size
- 4 × 4 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Year
- 2021
- Collection
- Ephemeral Atmosphere
- Palette
- Graphite Black · Prussian Blue · Carmine · Shadowed Umber · Rust · Olive Green · Mustard · Muted White · Soft Lilac · Dusty Pink · Brushed Steel
- Weight
- About 22 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 6–10 weeks
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Samara
- Texture3
- Form3
- Colour range4
- Palette2.1
- Contrast4.4
- Abstraction Quotient1.5
