Crooked Windows

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Playful Abstraction

Crooked Windows (2023) is a meditation on perspective — on how what we see is never quite what is, and how the structures we look through can distort, reveal, or even protect. Part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this 48 x 48 inch acrylic on canvas work invites the viewer to question the reliability of their own gaze.

The composition features angular lines and soft grids, painted over layers of weathered hues: storm gray, moss green, ochre, and quiet teal. Nothing aligns quite perfectly. Windows shift, bend, lean. Some open. Some don’t. It’s a painting about being inside and looking out — or being outside and trying to see in.

I created Crooked Windows while thinking about mental architecture — the frames we inherit or construct that shape how we understand reality. Sometimes they offer clarity. Other times, they skew. Either way, they frame everything.

This piece shares a conceptual dialogue with the work of Rachel Whiteread, particularly her architectural casts that reveal negative space and memory. Like Whiteread, I’m drawn to the idea of the unseen being just as present as the visible.

In Crooked Windows, distortion becomes language. The irregularity is not brokenness — it’s a deeper kind of truth. A reminder that what looks off may simply be a different kind of seeing.

As part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this painting suggests that liberation often begins not by breaking the frame, but by realizing the frame was never straight to begin with.