Break Free: 2005
Acrylic and Mixed Media on Salvaged Wood
At first glance, this painting reads as explosive color thrown, marks layered, symbols colliding. But the longer you sit with it, the more it tightens. This isn’t chaos expanding outward. It’s pressure building inward. Everything is happening inside a sealed space.
At the bottom, a human figure is bound in red chains.
The body is still recognizable beneath the constriction—contained, handled, held in place. But there’s a shift: one hand is breaking free. Not fully released, not yet escaped, but actively pulling against the restraint.
The tension lives there—in the moment between containment and rupture. Above it, the composition fractures.
White handprints surface across the middle of the painting. They don’t read as self-expression. They feel like evidence—marks left behind, proof of contact. They don’t say I was here. They say someone was here. The body below struggles for agency while the surface above records intrusion.
The language in the piece reflects the same fracture. “BREAK FREE” is spelled out in Scrabble tiles, assembled, not written. It’s constructed from external pieces, as if the idea of escape had to be learned, pieced together, built from what was available. The phrase exists, but it doesn’t dominate. It hovers as an incomplete directive. It sits in tension with the body below it.
Freedom is not declared here; it is attempted.
At the center, a bright yellow geometric form cuts through the composition. Its shape reads like a system, clean, deliberate, imposing. Something programmed: rules, structures, and frameworks designed to organize or contain. It doesn’t emerge from the chaos. It tries to contain it.
Everything else resists it. The paint moves around it, pushes against it, refuses to submit. The surface is dense, layered, and worked over. Marks are dragged, interrupted, and partially erased. There is no place to rest. Even the black ground presses forward, sealing everything inside.
The result is pressure.
There is no singular self presented. Instead, the body is distributed:
a figure bound, but resisting
a hand breaking through
prints that mark external presence
language assembled from fragments
symbols that impose structure
The self is not whole. It is in the process of reassembling. And that process is visible. It reads as something happening in sensory fragments and imprints.
The color reinforces this tension. Yellow signals caution. Red binds and exposes. White marks and ghosts. What emerges is a threshold.
The body is still bound. The system still exists. The marks of intrusion remain. But something has shifted with action.
A hand breaking free is the beginning of awakening.