Beneath the Surface

Phthalo Blue, Chinese Orange, Phthalo Green, Alizarin, Indian Yellow, Carbazole

Oil on Canvas. 18” x 18” x 1.5”, 2026

In oil painting, the first layer is rarely seen — and yet it determines everything.

This series begins with a simple premise: that the underpainting is not preparation, but foundation. Not a sketch to be covered, but the soul of the work, laid down first and never fully extinguished. Each successive glaze converses with what came before — muting it, revealing it, letting it breathe through. By the final layer, the earliest marks are still present, still speaking. The surface is only the last word in a long conversation.

These six paintings exist as three complementary pairs: blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple. Colors that sit opposite each other on the wheel — and opposite each other on the canvas. Each painting was underpainted with one color and glazed with its complement. What emerges is neither one nor the other, but something only possible through their dialogue. Complementary colors don't cancel each other out. They make each other more fully what they are.

This is what oil painting can do that nothing else can: hold time inside itself. The first mark and the last exist simultaneously, inseparable, each incomplete without the other. You are never looking at one moment. You are looking at all of them at once.

Phthalo Blue

A brilliant blue that can easily overwhelm. Layered with glazes and whites, it radiates through in oceanic depths — like staring into a sapphire lit from within. Paired with Chinese Orange, the two opposites don't cancel; they hum, producing a warm neutral no gray could achieve.

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Chinese Orange

The atmosphere is cool — mist, distance, the blue weight of fog. But the foundation holds: Chinese Orange, warm and persistent, glowing beneath everything built above it. A hope that even on the coldest day, there is warmth that remains.

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Phthalo Green

Phthalo Green is relentless in the tube — the pigment that stains everything it touches. Here, something draws it back — warms it, steadies it, pulls it from its own intensity. What remains is something no single color could achieve: a still, breathing atmosphere holding cool and warmth in suspension. The most demanding colors make the most subtle foundations.

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Alizarin

Alizarin runs deep red, a color of passion and permanence. The layers above cool it, quiet it, push it toward ash. And yet: where they thin, the crimson holds. The whole sky carries the warmth of what lies beneath without knowing why. This is how feeling works — quieted, but never fully gone.

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Indian Yellow

Indian Yellow is built for this. One of the most transparent pigments in oil painting, it was made for light to pass through — not to be seen directly, but to illuminate everything above it. Blues and greens laid over it don't just sit on the surface — they ignite. The yellow beneath is what makes them brilliant. You are not looking at yellow. You are looking at what yellow makes possible.

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Carbazole

Carbazole goes where the dark lives. One of the deepest pigments an oil painter can use, it holds the foundation like night holds the earth — completely, without apology. But darkness this deep has its own light. The layers above it move like aurora — that particular glow that only exists because of the dark beneath it. You cannot have this without that. What shimmers here feels ancient, atmospheric, earned.

In Private Collection

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