Fabric Over Stars

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 8ft x 6ft
Creation Date: 2022
Collection: Ephemeral Atmosphere

Fabric Over Stars (2022) is a meditation on veiling — the quiet power of covering, protecting, and revealing through layers. Part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 95 x 75 inch mixed media canvas explores the intimacy of surface and the mystery beneath it.

The painting suggests a vast sky cloaked in gauze. Textures ripple across the canvas like woven cloth, obscuring but not erasing the depth below. Specks of metallic pigment flicker underneath translucent washes, hinting at a galaxy just out of reach — hidden, not lost.

I created this piece thinking about protection — of dreams, of memory, of emotion. How we sometimes drape ourselves in metaphor to survive the brilliance of vulnerability. The fabric is a gesture of care.

Fabric Over Stars shares kinship with the work of El Anatsui, whose sculptural tapestries made from discarded materials transform surface into cosmos. While my materials are more painterly, the impulse is the same: to turn texture into meaning, and concealment into wonder.

The color palette is grounded in twilight — silvers, muted purples, dusky blues. It’s a nocturne. A hush. A whispered question about what we’re willing to see.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this painting exists in the tension between covering and cosmos. It asks: What lies beneath the surface? And what kind of starlight survives, even under the weight of fabric?