Purple Haze

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Hand-painted Photography

Purple Haze (2023) is a visual drift — a painting caught between presence and dream, clarity and cloud. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media on canvas piece from the Hand-painted Photography Collection is a soft meditation on perception, memory, and emotional atmosphere.

The work blends hand-painted layers over a photographic base. Wisps of lavender, storm gray, and muted plum float across the surface like thoughts left unspoken. Some marks are blurred. Others shimmer with faint epoxy gloss, catching light like fog catching sun.

I created Purple Haze while reflecting on how we remember — how images fade, bleed into one another, and return in unexpected tones. The purple is not symbolic. It’s sensory. It’s what memory feels like when it arrives wrapped in haze.

The painting resonates with the tonal experiments of Wolfgang Tillmans, who pushes the photographic into the abstract. Like Tillmans, I see light and atmosphere not as backgrounds, but as subjects in themselves.

Purple Haze isn’t about seeing something. It’s about what happens just before or just after. It’s about transition — from night into morning, from thought into feeling.

As part of the Hand-painted Photography Collection, this piece dissolves the boundary between representation and emotion, inviting the viewer to inhabit the blur.