Playing

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Hand-painted Photography

Playing (2023) is a celebration of freedom — an invitation to create without consequence, to explore without outcome. This 60 x 60 inch acrylic on canvas work belongs to the Hand-painted Photography Collection, where spontaneity leads and intuition answers.

The composition is vibrant and shifting. Swipes of turquoise, lemon yellow, and coral pink bounce between loose rectangles and curved forms. Negative space breathes between gestures. There’s a sense of rhythm, but no grid. Every shape seems to laugh, to lean, to move. Nothing is corrected. Everything is allowed.

I painted Playing with no plan, no sketch, no reference — just the desire to follow color and form where they wanted to go. The brush became a toy, the surface a sandbox. What emerged was not chaos, but joy — a field of choices made in the moment.

This piece resonates with the joyful nonchalance of Elizabeth Murray, whose fractured forms and cartoonish distortions rejected solemnity in favor of exuberance. Like Murray, I believe that play isn’t childish — it’s deeply human.

Playing asks nothing from the viewer except to engage. It’s not symbolic. It’s not ironic. It simply exists in motion, in energy, in the pleasure of pigment on surface.

As part of the Hand-painted Photography Collection, this painting affirms that art can be both light and meaningful — that sometimes the deepest experiences arise when we aren’t trying so hard to explain them.