The Forest Holds It's Breath

The Forest Holds its Breath explores the landscape as a psychological and spiritual space suspended between beauty, unease, and transformation. Developed through sustained layering and fluid applications of paint, the work draws on natural processes such as erosion, gravity, sedimentation, and decay, allowing the surface to evolve slowly and organically over time. Thin washes of diluted acrylic were poured, stained, and manipulated across the canvas to create atmospheric depths, while subsequent layers were built through glazes, scraping, and heavier gestural movements. At points, paint was allowed to drip and settle under its own weight, so gravity itself became an active collaborator within the making process.

Central to the work is the intense relationship between red and green — colours that both repel and depend on one another. Influenced by Johannes Itten’s colour theory and seasonal harmonies, the painting uses deep crimson, bruised magentas, moss greens, and blackened earth tones to create a visual tension that feels simultaneously seductive and threatening. The glowing reds move through the darker greens like an exposed wound or internal heat beneath the landscape, while luminous passages of pale green and ochre create moments of stillness and breath. These colour relationships become emotional as much as visual, pulling the viewer into a space that feels immersive, unstable, and psychologically charged.

The dark tree line standing across the horizon acts almost as a threshold or barrier, dividing the painting between surface and depth, presence and disappearance. Reflections dissolve into pools of saturated colour below, making it difficult to distinguish water from land or atmosphere from memory. The landscape becomes less a depiction of a real place and more a liminal environment shaped by emotion, intuition, and subconscious association.

Influenced by Mark Fisher’s writings on the eerie and the uncanny, the painting imagines nature not as passive scenery but as something sentient and watchful. The forest appears to hold itself in suspension, as though anticipating movement or transformation just beyond visibility. Through scale, colour, and process, the work attempts to overwhelm the viewer with a sensation of standing inside a living landscape — one that is slowly shifting, breathing, and looking back.