Portals and Presence: An Invitation to See Beyond
For the past few months, I've been in residency at Shoebox Arts, working on my "Beyond the Veil: Luminous Realms" series. It's been one of those rare stretches where the studio becomes a kind of sanctuary—just me, the paintings, and whatever invisible forces decide to show up.
These translucent layered works are doing something I've been chasing for years: creating actual portals between what we can see and what we sense but can't quite name. I build them up slowly, layer by layer, using mineral solutions and salts that crystallize into textures you have to see in person to really understand. Light moves through them differently depending on where you stand, what time of day it is, who's looking.
The series draws heavily from Persian mystical traditions—those Sufi ideas about veils between worlds, about how what's invisible is just as real as what we can touch. But I'm not illustrating those concepts; I'm trying to make them actually happen in paint. To create a visual experience of that threshold space where the material and immaterial overlap.
