Trauma Bonded, 2022
Oil, acrylic on canvas, 102 x 76 cm
Artist Note
“This painting emerged from an exploration in staining a raw canvas—a technique synonymous with Helen Frankenthaler. After the initial staining it lay around my studio for months bothering me. Every now and then I’d sporadically add something new, such as the scrap of paper, which you can see emerging from the purple near the upper left corner. At one point a larger piece of canvas was stuck on the bottom, right where you see the black. In a fit of frustration it was subsequently ripped off, leaving two frayed canvas borders that are almost imperceptable due to further layers of paint.
In and out of storage it went as I struggled to find a way forward. Until one day I was visited by another artist from Berlin who was showing at the gallery. She saw it hanging in the back of my studio and without even a moment’s hesitation she said ‘that one, leave it.’ And so I left it, and I started to see it as done and the painting and I learned to get along. And we bonded over the shared trauma of bringing it into the world.”
