Sunken Forest

There is no center in this painting.

I want to say that first, because it is the thing that made me unsure it was finished. Each of my last several canvases had an event in it: a line that kept returning to itself, an arch radiating heat, four arms of blue meeting at a lit crossing. The eye arrives somewhere. Here it does not. There is nowhere to land, and I stood in front of it for two days waiting to find the place I was supposed to look.

Then I understood that the absence was the painting.

This is a field. The whole surface is the subject, and it falls vertically, top to bottom, combed through so that every inch carries the same grain. The greens deepen and lift across the width, chartreuse surfacing on the right where something like sun is finding a gap, the left half sinking toward black. The light is not coming from a point. It is distributed, filtered, arriving the way light arrives under a canopy after it has already been through several hundred leaves.

Two things break the green world. A red thread runs the full height just right of center, and there is a small flare of magenta at the far left edge. They are the only warm notes in the whole field, and without them this would read as a landscape. With them it stays a painting.

Underneath it is a black and white canvas from 2024, called Vermont. That painting was finished. It had stopped speaking to me, and the topography was still magnificent, so the image went and the body stayed. Its comb is the comb you are looking at: the same vertical grain, running the full height, made four years ago in no color at all. This is the quietest transformation I have done. The others crossed languages, geometry becoming gesture, spirals becoming a confluence. This one did not translate anything. It only re-saturated. A black and white forest became a green one, and the grammar held.

I did not set out to make a work with no focal point. I set out to put green on a canvas that had gone quiet. But a field painting does not owe you a center, and the two days I spent looking for one were two days of asking the wrong question.

You do not stand in front of this. You stand in it.