Life Scratches

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Playful Abstraction

Life Scratches (2023) is not a painting of scars, but of survival. It’s a 48 x 48 inch mixed media work from the Playful Abstraction Collection, built from marks that don’t just cut the surface — they define it. Each gesture is a memory, each scrape a lived experience etched into form.

The painting’s surface is rough and layered — textured like weathered walls or worn skin. Scratches, lines, and abrasions dance across fields of gray, bone white, and rust. These marks don’t obey a pattern. They speak in fragments. Some are soft. Some tear through.

I created Life Scratches in a season of reflection — thinking about the things that leave traces on us: relationships, losses, growth, time. Not all of it hurts. But all of it leaves a mark. This painting became a tactile way of acknowledging that.

The piece shares conceptual lineage with Antoni Tàpies, whose gritty, textural abstractions bring materiality and metaphor together. Like Tàpies, I see every scratch as a form of communication — something ancient and emotional, recorded in surface.

Life Scratches is not decorative. It’s declarative. A chronicle of presence. A record of what endures.

As part of the Playful Abstraction Collection, this work turns pain into texture, memory into map. It doesn’t ask for resolution. It asks for witness.