Crashing

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 6ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Ephemeral Atmosphere

Crashing (2023) is a visual collision — a painting where energy doesn’t land, but shatters. Part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 72 x 48 inch mixed media work channels impact, entropy, and release. It is not about destruction, but about the beauty found in breaking apart.

The composition leans diagonally, as if pulled by gravity. Slashes of black and crimson tear across a base of pale violet and weathered steel. Texture builds and fragments — scratches, splatters, and directional force. There is no balance here. Only motion. Only impact.

I painted Crashing after a personal wave of overwhelm. The world didn’t fall apart — but it tilted. The canvas became a way to process the moment just after impact, when everything is still flying, before it settles again.

This work shares a kinetic sensibility with Joan Mitchell, especially her late canvases that blend lyrical color with raw, directional energy. Like Mitchell, I use abstraction to capture emotion not as mood, but as movement.

Crashing is not a story. It’s a state. A wave breaking. A breath taken too late. A record of a moment too fast to frame.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this painting captures the beauty of what doesn’t hold. What surges. What erupts. What releases.