When Color Was No Longer Necessary

Sometimes a painting tells you it isn't finished long before it tells you why.

I had been living with several paintings from my Excavating Through Time series with the feeling that something wasn't completely resolved. I liked them. I believed in what was happening within their surfaces—the concrete, the cracks, the ridges, the marks left by movement and pressure—but something continued to bother me.

I didn't know what it was.

My instinct as a painter has often been to respond by adding something. Another mark. Another gesture. Another layer. Painting is a conversation, and sometimes you keep speaking because you haven't yet heard the answer.

This time, the answer was the opposite.

Remove the color.

I began imagining one of the paintings entirely black.

Not partially black. Not black with areas of the original painting showing through. Completely monochromatic.

And suddenly I could see it.

The color had been asking my eye to look at one thing while the physical surface was asking me to look at another. Once I imagined the entire painting submerged beneath black, the concrete became the painting.

Every ridge mattered.

Every crack mattered.

Every scraped passage, accumulation, depression and accidental imperfection began responding to light differently. What appeared to be a single color wasn't really a single color at all. Black became charcoal where the surface caught the light and nearly disappeared where the concrete receded into shadow.

The painting hadn't lost complexity.

It had lost distraction.

What Remains Beneath

There is another reason this discovery feels important to me.

The original painting isn't actually gone.

Its colors remain underneath the black. Its previous gestures remain. Every decision that brought the painting to this point still physically exists, even though much of that history can no longer be seen.

That realization brought me directly back to what Excavating Through Time has been about from the beginning.

We carry things we can no longer see.

Memory becomes covered by memory. Experiences accumulate. Parts of ourselves become buried beneath everything that happens afterward. Time doesn't necessarily erase what came before—it builds upon it.

Concrete originally entered this work because I was interested in foundations, permanence, weight and excavation. I began covering portions of older paintings, physically burying one period of my work beneath another.

Now I find myself taking that idea somewhere I hadn't anticipated.

I am burying color itself.

And strangely, by taking something away visually, I am revealing more of the painting physically.

Black, White and What Comes Next

That first black painting led me to look again at several other works that had never felt completely settled.

Some wanted black.

Then I began imagining others in white.

The transformation was completely different.

Black seemed to pull the surface inward. Crevices became deeper. The paintings felt heavier, more mysterious and geological.

White exposed everything. Cracks became lines. Shadows described the ridges. The concrete felt almost archaeological, as though something had been uncovered rather than buried.

Black conceals. White exposes.

And somewhere between those two ideas, I realized I had found something I had been looking for without knowing I was looking for it.

For a while, I had been hesitant to begin the work of submitting this new body of paintings to galleries and other opportunities. I kept putting off the homework.

Now I understand why.

I wasn't completely settled with the work yet.

There was still a question inside it that I hadn't answered.

I think I finally have.

Excavating Through Time is becoming quieter in color and louder in material. Concrete, gesture, fracture, light and shadow are beginning to carry what color once carried.

And beneath those black and white surfaces, all those earlier paintings will still be there.

Buried, but not gone.