Neelkanth
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There is a stretch of the drive between Phoenix and Munds Park where, on a cloudy day, the mountains stop being mountains and become a colour.
Not a shape rendered in blue. A blue that happens to be sitting where the mountains are. Overcast strips the warm end out of the light, and once the warmth is gone the ridges stop receding in stages the way they do at four in the afternoon. They collapse into one tone with density variations. Nearer is not lighter. Farther is not smaller. There is only more or less of the same thing.
I have driven that road many times and never seen it. It took a cloudy day.
What I was actually after
I did not want to paint the mountains. I have never wanted to paint the mountains.
What I wanted was the condition — the specific fact that distance turns things blue, and that under cloud there is nothing warm left to argue with it. That is not a landscape. It is a property of air and light, and it happens to be visible on a highway in Arizona in the same way it is visible anywhere else.
So the canvas has no horizon. There is a faint vertical shift in value about two thirds of the way across, and I left it because it reads as a change in the light rather than a division of the space. A horizon would have made the painting about a place. This keeps it about a condition.
Four blues
Prussian Blue. Cerulean. Deep Teal. Slate.
That is the whole palette, and three of those four are doing work you would not notice if I did not name them. The Prussian closes the upper corners toward indigo. The Cerulean opens the centre-left into the luminous shallow passage that is the only place in the painting where anything pools. The Slate does the transitional labour that keeps the other two from flattening into each other.
The Colour Range on this work is 2 — near the bottom of the scale. Enough separation to build depth. Not enough to constitute a palette in the ordinary sense. The depth here is not made by colour. It is made by what colour is refusing to do.
The marks
Down the left third there is a column of long incised arcs, cut into the paint rather than laid onto it.
They are the reason to stand in front of this painting rather than look at a photograph of it. From directly in front, under flat light, they nearly vanish and the canvas is one blue plane. From the side, under a raking light, every one of them catches a silver edge and the whole column comes forward. The painting is materially different depending on where you stand — not a metaphor about perspective, an actual physical fact about the surface.
This is why the Contrast reading is low and why that is not a criticism. There is almost no value drama in this work. The drama is in relief.
The name
I did not have a name for four days. I was calling it the blue one.
Everything I tried announced itself. Mystic Blue Field — the word mystic competes with the mystery instead of producing it, blue is redundant, and field pulls it toward the discourse rather than the drive. Anything with mountain in it made the painting into a landscape, which is the one thing it is not.
The name that held is Neelkanth — the blue-throated one. At the churning of the ocean, Shiva drank the poison that came up with the nectar, and rather than swallow it or spit it out, he held it in his throat. The throat turned blue. The colour is the consequence of the holding.
That is what the painting is doing. There is darkness held in the upper corners and along the left column, and it is not released and it is not swallowed, and the rest of the surface stays open and luminous because of it, not despite it.
And then the marks stopped being marks. Those incised arcs are the veins — the places where what is held comes closest to the surface. Everywhere else the blue is diffuse and under. Along those lines it is visible.
Which means this is not a picture of a throat. It is the view from inside the skin.
What is underneath
Underwater, a five-by-five oil from 2024 in the Pulse of Life collection.
I did not choose it for its subject. I chose it because it was the right size and it was in the room. But the rhyme is too good to leave unmentioned: water and a throat are both blue because of what is suspended in them, and both ask you to look through rather than at.
The transformation kept the medium, kept the format, kept the hue family, and changed only the metaphysics. That is the strongest kind of transformation I make — not erasure, but a reassignment of what the colour is for.
Underwater is documented. Its page is still up. You can see what is under here, which is more than I can say for some of the others.
Where it sits
In the ArtGram, Neelkanth is The Fan — the mark leans hard toward Form and gives up Colour Range and Contrast to get there. It is a painting that spends almost everything on one axis.
Its sibling from the same fortnight, Rajasthani Ghagra, is The Shield: it spends everywhere at once. Same easel. Same weeks. Opposite strategies.
I did not plan that. I only noticed it once both marks were drawn.
Neelkanth is available. See it in the Abstract Inquiry collection.
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