Lips

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 2.5ft x 3ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Ephemeral Atmosphere

Lips (2023) is an exploration of intimacy — of expression without speech, of presence reduced to gesture. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media painting belongs to the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, where photographic elements are altered and abstracted through touch, layering, and concealment.

The image began with a photograph — a close-up, cropped, and blurred — over which layers of acrylic and pastel were applied, not to obscure but to reframe. The lips remain barely legible: a suggestion of shape, color, and movement. Around them, the canvas softens into powder pinks, peach, and charcoal smears.

I painted Lips thinking not about seduction or beauty, but about communication. The way lips speak, tremble, hesitate. The way they say more than words. This piece is about the trace of connection — what lingers after something has been said or almost said.

It shares a quiet affinity with Marlene Dumas, whose emotionally charged figurations collapse intimacy and ambiguity into single strokes. Like Dumas, I’m less interested in rendering bodies than in evoking the space around them — the psychic atmosphere they create.

Lips doesn’t stare back. It whispers. It invites the viewer to lean in, to wonder what is being said — or what was silenced.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this piece walks the line between exposure and erasure. A portrait made not of face, but of feeling.