Scratched Black Mirror

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 6ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Out of Darkness

Scratched Black Mirror (2023) is an abstract reflection on distortion — a painting that captures the feeling of seeing oneself only in fragments. This 72 x 48 inch mixed media work from the Out of Darkness Collection evokes both silence and disruption, stillness and struggle.

The painting’s surface is a deep, almost lightless black — layered in matte acrylic and epoxy resin. Across it, scratches are carved, not painted. These marks shimmer slightly in angled light, revealing their presence only when you lean in. Some scratches are shallow, others more violent, cutting into the underlayers like memories refusing to fade.

I created Scratched Black Mirror as a meditation on introspection — not the curated kind, but the kind that unsettles. The painting is not meant to reflect you. It reflects what is hidden behind your own surface: the thoughts that won’t smooth over.

This piece resonates with the conceptual tension of Rashid Johnson, whose works often scratch into material to unearth deeper psychological or cultural truths. Like Johnson, I see the scratch not as damage, but as record — of existence, resistance, survival.

Scratched Black Mirror is not about darkness. It’s about what happens when we try to see clearly and realize the surface itself is fractured.

As part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this painting stands as a mirror for emotional erosion — not destroyed, but revealed.