Band Aid

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

Band Aid is a painting about covering up and letting go — a visual meditation on small wounds, daily resilience, and the quiet tenderness of repair. Created with mixed media on a 27 x 19 inch wood panel, this work belongs to the Playful Abstraction Collection, where common objects and symbols are transformed into emotional metaphors.

A large cross shape — pink and beige — anchors the composition. Its soft matte tones contrast with a glossy background of deep blue, textured with layers of scratched pigment and translucent glaze. Like a literal bandage, the cross doesn’t completely hide what lies underneath. You can still see the mark, the edge, the residue of something before.

I made Band Aid while thinking about the many micro-healings we carry — from heartbreaks to headaches, from lost time to quiet grief. This painting doesn’t pretend to fix anything. But it does acknowledge the gesture. The effort. The care.

This piece echoes the object-based intimacy of Rachel Whiteread and the pop form of Claes Oldenburg, who both elevate the mundane into symbols of presence and memory. Band Aid lives between the literal and the symbolic — it’s not about the object, but what the object holds.

Band Aid is not loud. But it’s not silent either. It’s a small moment — of covering, of protecting, of continuing.