Dark Night: Shadows as Portals to Transformation

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2020

Dark Night (2020), part of my ReThink Collection, was created as an exploration of emotional landscapes often avoided — grief, loss, and the uncertainty that shadows bring. Measuring 48 x 48 inches, this acrylic on canvas work is dominated by deep, velvety blacks layered with hints of indigo and midnight blue. These hues act as both surface and depth, suggesting that darkness is not simply emptiness but a space teeming with unseen movement and possibility.

The work embraces restraint. No grand gestures, no violent strokes — only the slow, heavy accumulation of paint, like layers of breath held too long. It is a meditation on patience, on the difficult beauty of sitting with discomfort rather than running from it.

In creating Dark Night, I felt a strong kinship with Richard Serra, whose monumental, heavy steel works force the viewer into confrontation with mass, void, and space. Like Serra, I wanted Dark Night to feel physical, to have gravity, pulling the viewer into its dense field. Yet, where Serra’s works engage the body externally, Dark Night draws inward, inviting the viewer into the interior terrain of their own darkness.

This painting doesn’t offer answers. It offers a threshold — a portal into the fertile unknown that exists within the shadow. As part of the ReThink Collection, it invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with darkness, seeing it not as absence, but as the birthplace of transformation.