Thank You

Thank you

Gratitude is not where the darkness ends.  It is what you find inside it.

The Thank You series begins with an honest premise - that thankfulness is not only a mood or a lifestyle but a practice forged under pressure.  These paintings do not depict gratitude as it looks in its comfortable form.  They depict it as it actually arrives - in the middle of fear, in the gap between who you are and who you thought you would be by now, in the moment the weight shifts and something in you recognizes that you are still here, still whole, still capable of more than the doubt suggested.  That moment of recognition - that exhale, that release - is what every piece in this series is trying to hold.  

Each work is built on a dark ground.  Not as a stylistic choice but as a truthful one.  The warm metallics and creams that move through that darkness are not decoration - they are evidence.  They are the gold that was always present inside the pressure, the light that did not appear because the darkness lifted but because you learned to see differently.  The tension between ground and mark is never fully resolved in these paintings.  It was never meant to be.  Gratitude that costs nothing carries nothing.  These pieces carry everything.