Your Gentleness Has Made Me Great Painting

I created the Sanctuary series based on a rectangular border of many small, segmented oil paintings. The individual paintings fit together to form a sort of courtyard shape with a blank area in the center. I am someone who loves silence and stillness, and the empty center offers rest from the noise and movement around it. I think of each painting like a window -- a small glimpse of something bigger past the frame. All the small windows fit together to create a bigger window-like shape. The individual oil paintings are each painted by hand and feature colors and shapes vaguely suggestive of landscape, sky, or earth imagery. I manipulate the oil paint without brushes, pushing it across the surface and scraping it away so that it is both thick and thin. I also leave gaps between the oil paint shapes where white gesso shows through as a white linear element -- a type of barrier between the shapes of the paintings. But a barrier created by absence, rather than presence. I'm fascinated by containers, compartments, gaps, and boundaries, and by how parts fit together to create a whole. This painting is created on heavy-duty gallery-wrapped canvas.