The Connected series is built from the tension of coming together: the beauty it creates, the pressure it carries, and the changes it leaves behind. In a time when people are more connected than ever through screens, networks, and constant exchange, the work considers a quieter contradiction: connection does not always create closeness. It can also produce distance, distortion, interruption, and longing.

Through transparent and opaque fields of color, the paintings use sweeping arcs, measured distances, overlap, and color veils to hold balance and tension at the same time. Each veil can be read as a presence moving toward, away from, or across another. When colors and forms overlap, they create new shapes and colors; they also produce pressure, friction, and marks that remain.

The works are created horizontally on a custom-built stage. Long-radius tools, temporary anchor points repositioned for each painting, handmade squeegees, and controlled paint consistencies establish the structure of each work. The preparation is precise, but the act is physical and immediate. A color veil may be formed in one brief movement, while the surface records speed, pressure, resistance, drag, and chance.

Within each painting is a central paradox: controlled structure, uncontrolled behavior. The tool sets the path, but the paint does not fully obey it. Inside the boundary of the color veil, the surface is allowed to slip, skip, pool, thin, drag, stutter, or break. The larger arc holds, but within it the paint becomes wild, free, and unpredictable.

Connected reflects the way relationships, communities, and societies are shaped by contact. Coming together can create beauty, intimacy, and new possibility, but it can also expose tension, vulnerability, pressure, and change. The paintings do not resolve this contradiction. They hold it: what connects, what resists, and what remains after contact has altered everything involved.

The Connected series considers how we might hold multiple truths at once: connection and distance, structure and chaos, presence and absence. The work is an invitation to sit with contradiction, to find beauty in tension, and to recognize that what brings us together can also pull us apart.