Abstraction in Green: Tension in Organic Fields

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2020

Abstraction in Green (2020) is a 48 x 48 inch acrylic painting from my ReThink Collection, created during a time when I was questioning the emotional weight we attach to color — and how those associations can be unraveled. This piece is built around a single dominant hue: green. But rather than soothing or pastoral, it offers something far more complex.

The green in this painting is layered thickly, unevenly. It oscillates between radiance and suffocation. Some passages glow with light, suggesting growth or breath, while others are dense and impenetrable, evoking shadow, depth, and emotional pressure. The brushwork is purposefully inconsistent — thick, slashing marks collide with areas of near-dissolution, where pigment thins and the surface wavers like a memory eroding.

While creating this work, I found myself meditating on the psychological contradictions of green. It's a color often linked to renewal, nature, and calm — yet also to envy, decay, and entrapment. My goal was to hold both ends of that spectrum in the same visual space. The canvas becomes a terrain of emotional dissonance: hopeful in one corner, heavy in the next.

Abstraction in Green draws distant echoes from the work of Mark Rothko, particularly in how color becomes the subject itself. But where Rothko’s fields tend to suggest transcendence or surrender, this painting resists. It keeps the viewer grounded, pressed into the tension beneath the surface.

This isn’t a painting of a landscape. It’s a painting of sensation — of internal weather. It speaks to the emotions we don’t always name: the unrest beneath stillness, the memory within color, the pressure behind what seems serene.

Abstraction in Green invites you to look longer, to feel the contradiction, and to discover the instability in what once felt familiar.