Anagram

Medium: Pastel on Paper
Size: 2.3ft x 1.6ft
Creation Date: 2024
Collection: Playful Abstraction

Anagram is a visual puzzle — a painting that asks you to rearrange meaning. This 28 x19 inch mixed media work from the Playful Abstraction transforms letters into shapes, and shapes into rhythm. It’s not about spelling anything specific. It’s about letting language loosen its grip and become something visual, musical, and playful.

The composition is built on fragmented glyphs and half-recognizable letterforms. Angular characters in cobalt, magenta, and jet black crisscross the surface in layered planes, some painted, others etched. There’s a suggestion of code, of typography run wild, a remix of what was once structured into something uncertain and joyful.

I created Anagram while thinking about how we interact with words, especially in the digital age. Everything is fast, abbreviated, mutable. I wanted to break apart language the way we break apart meaning online — constantly reassembling symbols and identities.

There’s an echo of Christopher Wool here, in the way words get abstracted into noise. But where Wool is often confrontational, I wanted something more curious — something that invites play rather than provokes resistance.

Anagram doesn’t ask to be solved. It asks to be felt. The surface shimmers with possibility. Like an actual anagram, it’s both something and something else.