Mindful Craziness: Surrendering to Controlled Chaos

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

Mindful Craziness (2020), part of my Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, is a 48 x 48 inch acrylic on canvas that explores the fertile intersection between chaos and control. At first glance, the painting may appear unruly — a tangle of energetic, uncontainable marks that collide across the surface in vivid color and rapid motion. But beneath the apparent disarray lies an underlying sense of rhythm and presence. This is not chaos for chaos’s sake. It’s chaos held in awareness.

The work began without a plan — just motion, mark, and feeling. Lines loop, clash, and build atop one another in a layered improvisation, but each movement was made with intention. Every gesture in Mindful Craziness is a response to the last, a kind of visual listening that tracks the shifts of internal state. What results is not randomness, but a portrait of thought — the mind in full, expressive motion, charged yet composed, wild but watchful.

This piece resonates strongly with the spirit of Cy Twombly, whose scribbled and scrawled compositions captured the emotional nuance of the unfiltered mark. Like Twombly, I embrace imperfection and immediacy, treating the act of painting as a raw and vulnerable extension of thought and feeling. Yet where Twombly often leaned into the poetic and mythic, Mindful Craziness leans into everyday intensity — the lived experience of mental noise, contradiction, and creative spark.

The title is a provocation. It invites a reframing: What if the messiness we fear is actually full of wisdom? What if we learned to see beauty in our mental tangles?

Mindful Craziness doesn’t aim to calm the mind. It aims to mirror it — in all its layered, luminous complexity — and in doing so, invite the viewer to find clarity not despite the mess, but within it.