Ember Marsh

In Ember Marsh, the landscape becomes a threshold — a place where the visible and invisible meet. A darkened mountain edge presses against a burnished sky, while its reflection dissolves into a heavy, dripping body of water below. Built through successive layers of paint, the surface accumulates like sediment, echoing erosion and the slow, gravitational pull of time. 

Rather than depicting nature as stable or passive, the painting suggests it as a charged and sentient force. The surface shifts between solidity and dissolution; translucent glazes sit beside thicker gestures, allowing forms to emerge and then erode back into abstraction. Gravity is allowed to mark the work through drips and downward movements of pigment, so that the reflection becomes less a mirror and more a distortion — a liminal space where matter loosens and the familiar becomes unsettled.
The palette draws subtly on Johannes Itten’s seasonal colour theory, with autumnal ochres, muted greens, and earthen reds shaping the emotional register of the piece. These harmonies suggest both vitality and decay, warmth and shadow, reinforcing the sense of cyclical transformation. Here, the landscape holds memory and spiritual residue. 

This painting was developed through a process of sustained layering, building the surface gradually to echo the natural processes that inspire it — erosion, gravity, sedimentation, and the slow passage of time. I began with thin washes of diluted acrylic to establish an atmospheric ground, allowing colours to bleed and settle organically. These initial layers created a fluid base suggestive of shifting sky and landscape.

Subsequent layers were added using both brushes and palette knives, alternating between translucent glazes and thicker, more gestural applications of paint. At points, I allowed the paint to drip and pool vertically, referencing gravity and the downward pull of natural forces. Areas of heavier impasto contrast with thinner veils of colour, creating a tactile surface that mirrors geological accumulation and weathering.

My palette draws on Johannes Itten’s theory of seasonal colour harmonies, subtly structuring the composition through earthy autumnal tones and muted greens. These layered colour relationships suggest a boundary — both physical and psychological — between myself and the natural world. Through this process, the painting evolved as a dialogue between control and surrender, with each layer responding to the one beneath it, much like strata in a landscape.