A Deeper Dimension - 80 × 80 × 4 cm / 31.5 × 31.5 × 1.6 in
This one started with a question I couldn't stop thinking about.
There's an old idea — you'll find it in meditation, in yoga, in many spiritual traditions — that life happens on two different levels at once. One is horizontal: the plane of everyday events, one thing after another, the stress of what just happened or what's about to. It's real in the sense that it happens, but it isn't the deepest reality available to us — more a kind of game, a surface where things seem urgent and permanent but rarely are.
The other is vertical — the direction inward, toward stillness, toward a kind of presence that doesn't get shaken by whatever is happening on the surface. Eckhart Tolle describes it as "a deepening of your Being in the vertical dimension" — the quieter counterpart to everything we're usually chasing outward.
I wanted to paint both of these at once, honestly, on the same canvas. The strip running through the middle is a printed fragment of one of my own earlier paintings — not painted here, but reproduced, a copy of something that already happened once. That felt like the right material for the horizontal: an image once removed from the moment it was made, the way the horizontal plane itself is once removed from what's truly real. I gilded its torn edges rather than hiding them, because it deserved to be seen clearly, not tucked away.
Above and below it, everything is painted directly by hand — nothing reproduced, nothing copied. New branches rise in dimensional acrylic, and roots descend into bare linen I left completely unpainted, on purpose. This is the vertical: where the real blooming happens, where nothing is illusion or performance. The horizontal can be beautiful, even worth honoring — but it's in the vertical that things actually grow.
Medium: Acrylic (spray, Heavy Body, Fluid) and linen fabric collage on 100% linen canvas
Dimensions: 80 × 80 × 4 cm / 31.5 × 31.5 × 1.6 in
Year: 2026
Signed and dated by the artist
Comes with Certificate of Authenticity