Untitled (2025)

This untitled study belongs to a continuing investigation into the expressive capacity of light within absence, a theme that threads throughout my landscape practice. Here, the composition is reduced almost to abstraction: a solitary ruin perched on a precipice, its form nearly devoured by shadow, while a thin seam of gold dissolves along the horizon.

Though minimal in structure, the painting stages a quiet dialogue between permanence and erosion. The ruin, rendered as a silhouette, functions as a cypher rather than a monument. It is less a historical remnant than a psychological one — the trace of something once inhabited, now only witnessed by its own decay. The encroaching dark reads not as menace but as inevitability; the world folding into itself at the day’s edge.

The work is intentionally unresolved. It resists the picturesque, withholding narrative closure in favour of atmosphere and tone. The light is both event and memory — a final illumination that refuses complete extinction. In this sense, the study becomes an exercise in restraint: painting not the thing itself, but the interval between what is seen and what is already lost.

Painted digitally using short, impasto-like brushwork and a restricted value range, this study experiments with chromatic compression — reducing hue to near-monochrome while preserving warmth through layered translucent glazing. Broad directional strokes in the sky and terrain were applied with high opacity to mimic traditional oil scumbling, creating a tactile illusion of depth. The ruin was left deliberately indistinct, its edge blending into the atmospheric diffusion to maintain ambiguity between structure and landscape. The resulting image holds at the threshold of representation: an emotional study of disappearance.