Collection II: “AFTER”
Every day in the garden ended. And re-entering the world — its noise, its pace, the particular density of people who had spent their day somewhere entirely different — required a kind of recalibration that took time. Sometimes hours. Sometimes longer.
“After” is a series of acrylic paintings about that moment of return. About what people look like — really look like — when you've spent eight hours in near-total solitude with the natural world and then step back into the middle of them. Not distorted. Not unkind. Just seen differently. With the particular clarity, and the particular strangeness, that comes from having been somewhere else entirely.
The First Crowd I
The First Crowd II
In Between
Almost Familiar I
Almost Familiar II
Dressed for Something
Town of Clowns
The figures in these paintings carry the gaze of someone still half-inside the garden, still calibrating, still finding their way back into the rhythm of a world that never paused. There is something quietly surreal about that transition. These paintings don't look away from it.
Where Within began with a brush, After begins with a palette knife — a harder, more immediate tool, less forgiving, more alive to accident. The approach is more fluid, more abstracted. If Within has the quality of something understood — settled, held, resolved — After is about making a mess and finding sense in it. Letting the paint lead. Discovering structure beneath the chaos. The first marks are loose and gestural, and by the time a piece resolves, its subjects have often transformed numerous times over — shifting, resisting, slowly becoming themselves.
That is the method, and it mirrors the experience. Coming back into the city after eight hours of solitude, trying to locate yourself again in a world that kept moving while you were away. After is painted the way that feeling actually is — not cleaned up, not made comfortable. Found, slowly, in the middle of the uncertainty.
Immersion and return.
After does not offer answers about belonging or connection. It offers something more honest: the feeling of the question itself
The silence of the garden and the noise of stepping back out of it.
Together, the two collections form a complete circuit. The world that asked nothing and the world that asked everything.