Stillness — Interior States

30 × 30 inches | Original Contemporary Abstract Painting

In Stillness, I explore what happens when the movement quiets. The painting was inspired by a simple experience in nature: looking through layers of green trees toward an open sky, noticing the ivory of passing clouds and the deep shadows that exist between the branches.

I reduced those elements to broad fields of charcoal, emerald, evergreen, ivory and a blue-periwinkle hue I call “Skywinkle.” Rather than representing the landscape itself, I wanted to hold onto the feeling of it—the relationship between earth and sky, light and shadow, openness and enclosure.

Unlike many of the works in my Interior States collection, Stillness does not use forced perspective, directional lines or fluid movement to pull the viewer toward an interior space. The composition is intentionally more static. Here, color becomes the architecture. Each field rests against another, creating depth through proportion, contrast and the subtle tension between colors rather than through perspective.

That difference feels important to me. Our interior lives are not always moving toward something. There are moments when introspection happens through pause—when we become aware of what surrounds us, what exists within us, and the quiet relationship between the two.

The natural world appears throughout Interior States as a reflection of the interior self. In Stillness, I wanted to strip that relationship down to its essential elements: sky, earth, light and shadow translated into color.

For me, Stillness is about the quiet that exists when we stop searching for where we are going and allow ourselves simply to be where we are.