Strata of Becoming

In this diptych, the landscape breathes across two bodies, cresting and collapsing in a slow exchange between matter and memory. Mountain forms rise and soften, their weight pulled downward into veils of water where pigment gathers, drips, and settles. Gravity becomes a quiet collaborator — drawing colour toward the earth, allowing it to bleed and stain like rain carving its path through stone.

Layers accumulate like sediment. Thin washes seep into the canvas, while denser gestures press against them, creating a surface that feels weathered rather than painted. Erosion is not only depicted but enacted; paint is allowed to wander, to pool, to leave its own trace of time. The surface holds these events — each drip a record of descent, each translucent veil a measure of duration.

Yet within this surrender to natural forces, there is an act of shaping. I return to interrupt the flow, to carve horizon lines from dissolution, to anchor fleeting forms before they disappear. The palette, informed by Itten’s seasonal harmonies — muted greens, earthen ochres, mineral blues, and sudden embers of red — moves between growth and decay, warmth and shadow.

Here, the landscape is neither passive nor fixed. It is a site of exchange, where gravity, time, and erosion share authorship with the artist’s hand. What emerges is not a stable view, but a living threshold — a place where control and release meet, and where the natural world quietly asserts its presence within the act of painting.