Spiraling into Stillness
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This painting no longer exists.
On July 10, 2026, I set Spiraling down on the sawhorses and it landed sideways. I painted over it. What stands on it now is called The Sangam — four arms of blue flowing inward to a lit crossing, and the ridges that carry all of its light are the ridges of this painting, turned ninety degrees.
I did not paint over it because it failed. I stood in front of it and felt nothing, and the topography was still magnificent. So the image went and the body stayed.
But read what I wrote about it in 2022, below, before you decide what happened here.
I called it motion without arrival. A holding pattern. Circling something without grasping it. I asked whether the spiral was a trap or a process.
Four years later the spirals became a confluence, and the confluence has a still, bright center, and the painting that could not arrive arrived.
I did not plan that. A canvas fell on a sawhorse in the wrong orientation and I painted what was in front of me. But the title was Spiraling into Stillness, and I am not going to pretend I don't notice.
→ See what it became: The Sangam
Written in 2022
Spiraling is a visual embodiment of motion without arrival — a meditation on cycles, feedback loops, and emotional repetition. This 72 × 60 inch acrylic painting captures what it means to circle around something without fully grasping it.
Built in concentric waves, fractured arcs, and half-visible curves, the painting moves without resolving. The brushwork is urgent but deliberate — like thought caught in pattern.
I created this work during a time of internal echo — when the same questions kept returning, only slightly altered. Spiraling doesn't depict confusion. It depicts the rhythm of trying.
In its restless geometry and layered form, the painting finds kinship with the work of Terry Winters, whose paintings map thought and movement through spatial abstraction. Like Winters, I am drawn to the structure of entropy — where systems don't collapse, but loop.
Spiraling is not a descent. Nor is it a rise. It is a holding pattern — one that is both frustrating and strangely beautiful. You're in motion. But you're not lost. You're learning the shape of your own orbit.
It asks: what if the spiral isn't a trap, but a process?
