The Meandering Within: Reflecting on My 2020 Paintings

In my 2020 paintings, I drifted — between form and feeling, between restraint and rebellion. Each canvas became a space of meandering, a map of emotional detours, quietly echoing the tensions of artists like Judd, Murray, and Mehretu, while carving out my own paths through abstraction.

Organic Memory from Childhood, 4ft x 3ft, Playful Abstraction, 2020

Looking back at my 2020 paintings, what strikes me most is the meandering — not as aimlessness, but as a deliberate, intuitive drift through forms, colors, and emotional terrains. The year was marked by confinement, but my practice resisted straight lines and final answers. Instead, it unfolded like a series of conversations, detours, and quiet rebellions against rigidity.

In works like Black Frame and Brown Frame, I explored containment not just as a geometric device, but as an emotional metaphor — much like the formal austerity of Donald Judd, yet imbued with a personal vulnerability that Judd’s precision often eschewed. My frames are not perfect; they tremble, fracture, and question their own purpose.

Elsewhere, in paintings like Broccolini and Colorful Caterpillar, I embraced the absurd, the playful, the deliberately awkward. These works, in their humor and irreverence, remind me of Elizabeth Murray and Philip Guston, whose abstract forms squirm with life, resisting the heaviness often associated with minimalism. Here, I allowed myself to lean into the messy, the cartoonish, the parts of myself that laugh even when the world feels too heavy to hold.

Works like Delta Variant and Weeping Future navigate the intersection of chaos and collapse. In these, the influence of Julie Mehretu feels palpable — the layering of marks, the suggestion of maps without geography, structures dissolving into atmosphere. But where Mehretu’s works often gesture outward toward societal landscapes, mine pull inward, charting the personal, the domestic, the unseen upheavals of the self.

What ties these disparate works together is not a coherent style or a linear progression, but a willingness to let the painting lead. My 2020 collection is less a series of destinations and more a map of meanderings — a reflection of a year where the act of painting became an act of surrender, of listening, of letting things unfold without forcing them into tidy narratives.