Transcendence: When an Abstract Painting Becomes a Story

Inner Connected changed how I began to understand my work as a whole.

But Transcendence changed how I started thinking about paint and narrative.

Transcendence is a large abstract painting that explores transformation, resistance, and the moment when an idea breaks through the surface of a painting.

The painting began as a kind of struggle between an idea and the surface of the canvas.

I’ve been pushing myself to move further into abstraction, and Transcendence was one of the first times I truly allowed myself to do that.

I started with an old canvas that had been sitting in storage for years. Something I didn’t have any attachment to. I didn’t want the pressure of preserving anything. I wanted the freedom to experiment.

I just wanted to let go and see what would happen.

Of course every painting still starts with some kind of idea.

At first, the idea was simple. Roots wrapping across the canvas, transforming into a tree-like structure that would create tension between growth and resistance.

But as I began painting the roots, the surface of the canvas itself started to become part of the story.

Instead of the roots simply sitting on top of the surface, I painted the surface as if it were pressing down on them.

Because I had just finished Inner Connected, I started wondering if the tree could actually be made of the figures I had been painting. The same intertwined forms that appeared in the Love Looks Like series.

So I sketched the figures in quickly, letting them twist and wrap together to form the structure.

Then something interesting happened.

Instead of wrapping around the surface and emerging again, the figures began to feel like they were trapped beneath it.

The surface of the painting became something heavy.

Something resisting them.

So the figures changed.

Instead of embracing each other like they had in the earlier paintings, they began clawing and crawling across the canvas, searching for a way through.

In Inner Connected and Love Looks Like I had started cutting holes into the figures. Limbs would pass through them, weaving the figures together in a literal way.

Those openings often appeared in places like the heart or the head. I would paint a glow inside them, suggesting something within us that connects us.

Love.
Consciousness.
Maybe even a soul.

In Transcendence that idea continued, but it began to evolve.

As the figures moved across the surface of the painting they seemed to change. The struggle against the surface forced them to become something else.

More openings appeared.

More light.

The figures grew warmer as they moved.

And that’s when the fire appeared.

The figures stopped feeling like bodies and began to feel more like energy.

The surface could resist roots and figures, but it couldn’t contain the flames.

The energy broke through.

The figures transcended their forms to escape the pressure of the surface, and in that moment the painting revealed its name.

The heat even began to warm the surface of the canvas itself, as if the painting was transforming the reality it existed within.

This whole story slowly revealed itself as I followed the painting through each stage of the process.

By the time I stepped back from it, it was clear that the story wasn’t finished. The painting had become a story about transformation, and it was obvious that the larger abstract series it belonged to was only beginning.

So I started the next painting.