Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Ephemeral Atmosphere · 2023
Spilt Cream
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
The spill that became a painting — white releasing itself without apology, the domestic act given monumental scale.
Spilt Cream (2023) is an ode to accident — a painting that captures the poetry of mess, the beauty of what happens when control gives way to flow. This 84 x 84 inch acrylic and mixed media piece from the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection embraces looseness, softness, and the visual warmth of the unplanned.
The canvas is awash in warm whites, ivory, and subtle hints of honey gold and blush. A central spill — thick and gestural — pours across the surface like milk across stone. The texture is rich and tactile, with brushstrokes and drips frozen mid-motion. Around the edges, faint marks suggest the remains of intention: wiped lines, hesitant curves, half-drawn forms.
I painted Spilt Cream during a period when precision no longer felt useful. I wanted to explore imperfection as presence — to see how something accidental could feel more honest than anything carefully designed. This work is a celebration of softness and surrender.
It resonates with the intuitive materiality of Helen Frankenthaler, particularly her soak-stain paintings, where pigment and surface merge. Like Frankenthaler, I’m interested in how painting can be both act and aftermath.
Spilt Cream doesn’t clean up after itself. It rests in the moment after the spill — where chaos becomes calm, and mess becomes form.
As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this piece is about release. Not mistake, but moment. Not damage, but flow.
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 10 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 10 ft or more
- Light
- Natural light transforms this work — morning and evening light read differently
- Daylight
- Raw parchment poured across near black makes a high-contrast, neutral pairing that holds steady in any daylight. At seven feet square it can face a window; low side light brings up the texture of the spill.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
Spilt Cream earns this room fully: its seven-foot spread of near-black dissolving into raw parchment gives a living room the kind of slow, pressureless gravity that invites people to stay and look longer than they planned.
Bedroom 4/5
At seven by seven feet the canvas almost fills a bedroom wall, but the tenderness in those pale parchment forms settling out of darkness makes the scale feel like shelter rather than intrusion, especially in morning light.
Details
- Size
- 7 × 7 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Year
- 2023
- Collection
- Ephemeral Atmosphere
- Palette
- Near Black · Black · Bone Shadow · Raw Parchment
- Weight
- About 65 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 6–10 weeks
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Spray
- Texture4
- Form1
- Colour range2
- Palette4.9
- Contrast4.7
- Abstraction Quotient3.5
