Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Abstract Inquiry · 2023
Life Scratches
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
The marks life leaves — every scratch a record of something that happened, the surface as biography rather than design.
Life Scratches (2023) is not a painting of scars, but of survival. It’s a 48 x 48 inch mixed media work from the Playful AbstractionCollection, built from marks that don’t just cut the surface — they define it. Each gesture is a memory, each scrape a lived experience etched into form.
The painting’s surface is rough and layered — textured like weathered walls or worn skin. Scratches, lines, and abrasions dance across fields of gray, bone white, and rust. These marks don’t obey a pattern. They speak in fragments. Some are soft. Some tear through.
I created Life Scratches in a season of reflection — thinking about the things that leave traces on us: relationships, losses, growth, time. Not all of it hurts. But all of it leaves a mark. This painting became a tactile way of acknowledging that.
The piece shares conceptual lineage with Antoni Tàpies, whose gritty, textural abstractions bring materiality and metaphor together. Like Tàpies, I see every scratch as a form of communication — something ancient and emotional, recorded in surface.
Life Scratches is not decorative. It’s declarative. A chronicle of presence. A record of what endures.
As part of the Playful Abstraction Collection, this work turns pain into texture, memory into map. It doesn’t ask for resolution. It asks for witness.
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 preferred — the resin catches it and the color shifts through the day
- Daylight
- Spectral gray and twilight blue keep it steady in daylight, and side light from a window catches the scratches. The muted red and ochre are the parts that warm toward evening.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
Life Scratches earns its place here because the ochre and muted red striations read differently by morning coffee than by evening lamplight, and a living room is the one domestic space where a painting is allowed to ask something of you every time you pass it.
Hotel lobby 4/5
At four by four feet the scale commands a lobby wall without overwhelming it, and the spectral gray ground keeps the work legible to a transient audience that will not stop long enough to earn the deeper textures.
Details
- Size
- 4 × 4 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
- Spectral Gray · Epoxy Resin · Muted Red · Twilight Blue · Ochre
- Weight
- About 22 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 8–12 weeks
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Fork
- Texture3
- Form3
- Colour range3
- Palette3.1
- Contrast3.5
- Abstraction Quotient2
