"Entangled" Painting

My work returns repeatedly to the tondo: a format historically associated with wholeness and devotional attention, which I use as a contained world rather than a framed view. The circle does not resolve what is inside it. It holds it.
I paint in acrylic and mixed media, building surfaces with metallic leaf - gold, variegated and silver - that respond to light differently across the day and depending on where the viewer stands. This is not incidental. The instability of the surface is part of the meaning: what is seen is never fixed, and looking is always an act performed under particular conditions.
The work draws on literature as a structural resource rather than illustration. Eliot, Wilde, Cohen, Sartre, these are writers who understood that language breaks down precisely at the moments that matter most, and who built that breakdown into the form of their work. I am interested in the same territory: states of submersion, thresholds, endurance. The space between living and not, between coherence and dissolution, between the crack and the light that enters through it.
The figures in my paintings hold their glances as subjects and observers while everything around them is in motion : foliage pressing in, water falling, dark marks moving against the current. The landscapes carry the same psychological weight: seas and waterfalls painted not as spectacle but as inner states made visible.
I work from the premise that beauty and imperfection are not opposites. Gold leaf appears in darkness. Light finds the fracture. The depth is where the truth is spoken.
By day I tattoo. I work on a living surface that moves, ages, tans, and heals: a medium where the image is never finished, only released into the body to live its own life. This has reshaped how I think about painting. A tattoo belongs to the body's changes the way my canvases belong to the changes of daylight. Skin taught me about surface the way ink wash taught me about gesture: nothing is fixed, everything is in motion, and the artist's job is to set the image free rather than pin it down.
The circle is important. Quoting the moon gates and round fans of classical Chinese art, it has no beginning and no end; it holds a moment the way water holds a reflection: briefly, and always in flux. Like the ink wash masters, I am less interested in describing a scene than in capturing its qi, its living energy.