Delta Variant: Chaos, Mutation, and Atmospheric Tension

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 6ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2020
Collection: Ephemeral Atmosphere

Delta Variant (2020) emerged from a moment when the world was holding its breath — grappling with the invisible mutations of a virus, but also the visible fracturing of social, emotional, and personal landscapes. As part of my Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 72 x 60 inch acrylic on canvas became a visual manifestation of that chaotic, unsteady atmosphere.

The composition is unruly, layered with swirling forms, tangled lines, and gestural bursts of acidic yellows, deep purples, and electric blues. The painting feels unstable by design — a shifting, mutating field that refuses coherence, mirroring the disorientation of the time.

In this layered chaos, I felt a kinship with Julie Mehretu, whose monumental works map socio-political ruptures and collective anxieties through gestural abstraction. Like Mehretu, I am drawn to the notion of the painting as a kind of atmospheric document — recording not just what is seen, but what is felt within a cultural, political, and personal climate.

But where Mehretu’s maps gesture toward urban geographies and systemic forces, Delta Variant turns inward, mapping the chaos of the body, the mind, and the intimate spaces of fear and uncertainty. The forms do not stabilize; they swirl, bleed, and collide, suggesting a relentless, viral energy that seeps into everything.

This painting is not an illustration of a moment, but an enactment of it — a surface that pulses with the restless, breathless tension of mutation and collapse.