Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Abstract Inquiry · 2023
Playing
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
The inquiry at play — abstraction before it became serious, the mark made for the pleasure of making it.
Playing (2023) is a celebration of freedom — an invitation to create without consequence, to explore without outcome. This 60 x 60 inch acrylic on canvas work belongs to the Hand-painted Photography Collection, where spontaneity leads and intuition answers.
The composition is vibrant and shifting. Swipes of turquoise, lemon yellow, and coral pink bounce between loose rectangles and curved forms. Negative space breathes between gestures. There’s a sense of rhythm, but no grid. Every shape seems to laugh, to lean, to move. Nothing is corrected. Everything is allowed.
I painted Playing with no plan, no sketch, no reference — just the desire to follow color and form where they wanted to go. The brush became a toy, the surface a sandbox. What emerged was not chaos, but joy — a field of choices made in the moment.
This piece resonates with the joyful nonchalance of Elizabeth Murray, whose fractured forms and cartoonish distortions rejected solemnity in favor of exuberance. Like Murray, I believe that play isn’t childish — it’s deeply human.
Playing asks nothing from the viewer except to engage. It’s not symbolic. It’s not ironic. It simply exists in motion, in energy, in the pleasure of pigment on surface.
As part of the Hand-painted Photography Collection, this painting affirms that art can be both light and meaningful — that sometimes the deepest experiences arise when we aren’t trying so hard to explain them.
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 8 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 9 ft or more
- Light
- Natural light preferred — the resin catches it and the color shifts through the day
- Daylight
- Mostly charcoal and pale gray, it holds steady as daylight changes. The deep wine accents warm a touch in late sun, and the darkest passages prefer a wall without direct glare.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
Playing earns its 5 here because a five-foot square of acrylic under resin in charcoal and wine, full of visible brush decisions made in the moment, becomes the room's anchor without demanding explanation from anyone in the room.
Hotel lobby 4/5
The dark gloss passages catch lobby light unpredictably and the wine accent reads as hospitality rather than aggression, giving transient guests something alive to briefly inhabit, though the gray-dominant palette stops short of the warmth a lobby ideally radiates.
Details
- Size
- 5 × 5 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
- Charcoal Gray · Spectral Gray · Dark Gloss · Pale Gray · Deep Wine
- Weight
- About 45 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 8–12 weeks
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Sprig
- Texture3
- Form4
- Colour range2
- Palette3.2
- Contrast3.8
- Abstraction Quotient-4
