Layers of Reality or Not

Layers of Reality or Not (2020) is a 48 x 48 inch mixed media work from my Hand-Painted Photography Collection, a series that emerged from my fascination with the uneasy marriage between the objective and the subjective — the camera’s cold clarity and the hand’s expressive ambiguity. Created by painting directly over a printed photograph, this piece blurs the line between documentation and invention, inviting the viewer to examine not just what they’re seeing, but how they are seeing.

The original photograph beneath this work is intentionally obscured by thick gestures of acrylic paint — sometimes veiling details entirely, sometimes allowing fragments to flicker through. The brushstrokes don’t clarify; they complicate. In this way, the piece becomes a visual negotiation between fact and feeling, between the surface and what lies beneath. Each layer added is a new decision, a new disruption of assumed truth.

This dynamic tension draws strong inspiration from the work of Gerhard Richter, especially his blurred photo paintings that challenge our assumptions about clarity, memory, and representation. Like Richter, I’m interested in the illusion of certainty. Photographs pretend to tell the truth — but memory, experience, and interpretation reveal that truth is always layered, contingent, and mutable.

Layers of Reality or Not pushes the viewer into this ambiguity. It denies a singular reading and instead opens a multiplicity of possible meanings. Is the base image a landscape? A face? A street? The more one looks, the less one knows — and that unknowing is where the work begins to resonate.

This painting invites you to question what you believe you see, to confront the slipperiness of perception, and to consider how every image — like every memory — is shaped as much by what is added as by what is erased.