Golden Shroud

Golden Shroud (2023) is a meditation on concealment — not as avoidance, but as reverence. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media work, part of the Pulse of Life Collection, explores what happens when light isn’t used to expose, but to veil.

The painting is layered with metallic gold washes, almost translucent, floating over a muted foundation of ash gray, bronze, and tarnished white. Underneath, barely-visible lines and fragmented forms shimmer and recede like shapes behind silk. The composition resists clarity. It asks you to stay awhile — to wait for the surface to settle.

I created Golden Shroud while reflecting on the sacred in abstraction — how covering something can also honor it. The gold in this painting isn’t decorative. It’s devotional. A material that both elevates and hides.

The work finds kinship with El Anatsui, whose shimmering installations collapse the distance between material richness and conceptual weight. Like Anatsui, I believe in the language of texture — in the story that glimmers beneath repetition and fold.

Golden Shroud is not a mask. It’s a ritual. A way of saying that some truths do not need to be revealed to be felt. The glow is not the message. It’s the gesture.

As part of the Pulse of Life Collection, this piece adds softness to geometry — suggesting that precision, too, can be gentle. And that not all gold is meant to shine brightly. Some is meant to hold space, quietly.