“Chain Gang”

I’ve always been fascinated by how abstract forms can communicate what words cannot. Chain Gang began as an intuitive exploration — a series of gestural loops painted over a gridded collage of calico squares. The process felt rhythmic, almost musical: paint, pause, layer, repeat. As the piece evolved, those overlapping shapes began to speak to one another, forming a quiet language of connection and motion.

Abstraction, to me, is about listening to what the painting wants to say. The loops in Chain Gang carry a sense of continuity and conversation — they echo the way thoughts overlap, or how memories tangle and resolve. Beneath them, the grid anchors the composition, suggesting structure and containment, while the translucent washes hint at what’s hidden beneath the surface.

The title arrived late, as my titles often do. “Chain Gang” captured the duality I was feeling — a rhythm of movement and repetition, but also a tension between freedom and constraint. There’s a human quality to that tension, a reflection of how we navigate connection and individuality, discipline and expression.

In the studio, I think of painting as translation — a way to map emotion, time, and texture into form. The loops become words, the layers become syntax, and the overall composition becomes a kind of visual poem. Like any language, it’s both deliberate and instinctive, shaped as much by feeling as by form.

Chain Gang marks a turning point in my practice — a move toward clarity through complexity, toward finding stillness within repetition. It’s a reminder that even within the most abstract gestures, meaning can emerge — if we’re willing to look, and to listen.