Cold Blue Light
oil on linen
18x32"
 
This painting stages an encounter between psyche and surface, instinct and structure. Its imagery—flowers in riotous bloom, birds arrested mid-gesture, domestic vessels, and the unmistakable presence of bone—forms a symbolic constellation rather than a narrative. These objects function as archetypal residues: the bird as psyche in motion, the skull as the irrevocable fact of mortality, the flowers as the transient eruption of life-force. They coexist not to illustrate meaning, but to activate it.
 
From a Jungian perspective, the still life becomes a psychic field in which opposites are held simultaneously—eros and decay, flight and grounding, consciousness and the instinctual substrate beneath it. The skull does not negate vitality; it stabilizes it. Color operates as affect rather than description, allowing unconscious content to surface through chromatic tension. The image invites the viewer into a process of individuation, where beauty is not sanitized but earned through confrontation with impermanence.
 
Yet the painting resists illusionistic closure. Its meaning is inseparable from its facture. Following Greenberg’s insistence on the autonomy of the medium, paint asserts itself unapologetically: strokes remain visible, color is layered rather than blended away, and spatial depth is compressed into a shallow, frontal plane. The pleasure of the work lies not in symbolic decipherment alone, but in the immediate optical experience—color against color, edge against edge, rhythm against stillness.