The Shape of Holding Multitudes

The Shape of Holding Multitudes began with Walt Whitman's assertion, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” His embrace of contradiction gave me a structure for thinking about something I had long felt: that being human means holding seemingly opposing states at once—grief and joy, rupture and tenderness, belonging and estrangement, longing and becoming.

But as the series has evolved, I have become less interested in describing multiplicity and more interested in creating an atmosphere where it can be felt.

Through layered color, translucent veils, gravity-driven drips, erasure, and intuitive mark-making, forms emerge, dissolve, and remain partially visible beneath one another. Nothing has to disappear completely for something else to exist. Increasingly, quieter passages and areas of openness have become as important as the marks themselves, allowing the paintings—and the viewer—room to breathe.

The paintings share an atmospheric language with my abstract landscapes, but they are not landscapes. They are spaces to inhabit: shifting conditions where contradiction, memory, uncertainty, belonging, and recognition can coexist without requiring resolution.

As the work grows in scale, I am increasingly interested in what happens when a painting moves beyond something we look at and begins to surround us. The series is evolving toward an immersive experience—one in which atmosphere becomes a kind of architecture and the viewer can feel, however briefly, as though they have stepped inside the painting.

Whitman provides the structure. Atmosphere is what holds us.