Shade

Shade feels like an abstracted landscape—perhaps a mountainside at night, or a stretch of coastline caught between dusk and forgetting. But more than anything, it reads like a place the mind goes rather than a place the body visits.

The flowing contours of dark blues and black create a kind of visual gravity, pulling the eye inward through the winding, shadowed form. These lines feel like both river and wound—fluid and organic, yet also heavy with suggestion. The teal foreground, flat and hushed, offers a strange kind of surface tension. It doesn’t welcome you so much as contain you, making the darker middle section feel like a passage—something half-visible, almost subterranean.

There’s also a subtle tension between concealment and exposure. The darkness suggests depth, but gives away nothing. The light is there, but pale, indirect, almost abstract in its disinterest in realism. What emerges is a painting that doesn’t explain itself. Instead, it evokes—a state of sleep, of dream, of the mind retreating into its quietest chambers.

Shade/ Acrylic ink/ 18 x 12.5 cm