Under Ash: A Monumental Painting That Smolders Beneath the Surface

In the “Scrape” series, there’s a recurring theme of excavation—pulling memory, texture, and color through layers of tension and time.

One of the most powerful examples in the collection is a recent large-scale diptych titled Under Ash.

This piece spans 8 feet wide by 5 feet tall—a blackened monument that commands whatever wall it inhabits. It’s a diptych, but it reads as one unified surface: dark, dense, and impossibly deep. Built up through layer after layer of epoxy resin, scraped acrylic, and matte-black embellishments applied atop the resin, Under Ash has become less a painting and more a sculptural field—tactile, unforgiving, and full of quiet violence.

The black-on-black textures hold your gaze, but it’s what’s happening at the bottom of the painting that steals your breath.

Hints of yellow, orange, and red flicker just beneath the surface, giving the illusion of embers glowing inside a collapsed structure, or something once hot now buried and cooling slowly beneath hardened earth.

That restrained heat pushes upward against the weight of the black—a visual pressure you can feel.

The resin reflects light in unpredictable ways, like glints off obsidian or oil. And on top of it all, the raised black elements break the plane entirely, casting shadows and creating dimension that begs to be touched. It feels scorched. Sealed. Transformed.

Under Ash is about what we suppress, what we bury, and what continues to burn underneath. It’s both aftermath and warning. A painting that doesn’t tell you what happened—just that something did.

And like all the works in the Scrape series, it invites a slower read.

It asks you to look closer, feel the surface, and understand that meaning is built in layers—scraped, scarred, hidden, and smoldering.