Desert Salad: A Celebration of Movement and Form

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: Diptych – 54 inch x 108 inch (Two panels, each 54 inch x 54 inch)
Creation Date: November 2024
Collection: Pulse of Life

Desert Salad is a diptych that captures the playful collision of structure and spontaneity. Measuring 54 inches by 108 inches across two canvases, it’s a large, breathing landscape of color, energy, and rhythmic form—painted in acrylic with a freedom that still feels carefully held.

The shapes unfold like an improvised map—organic, shifting, and alive. Pools of red, yellow, and blue pulse against fields of olive green and a vibrant cobalt sky, all outlined by bold black and softened again by layers of shifting tones. It’s a conversation between inside and outside, containment and overflow. The edges vibrate, but the spaces in between offer pause—a moment to catch your breath before moving again.

When I began this piece, I wasn't thinking about a desert exactly—but about the abundance of forms that life offers when you look closely. Seeds, stones, pools, tracks—the abstract language of survival and bloom. As the painting evolved, it took on a feeling I associate with the desert: open, surprising, rich beyond its first impression.

Working at this scale was physical. It demanded movement, risk, adjustment—an extension of my body into the work. The diptych format allowed for both separation and unity: two panels, two rhythms, one shared pulse. It became less about painting an image and more about stepping into a landscape of emotion and motion.

Desert Salad invites viewers to navigate their own path through color and form, to feel the pull of one curve into another, the lift of yellow against blue, the small shocks of red anchoring the movement. It’s a reminder that even in vast, unpredictable spaces, there is a strange and joyful order waiting to be discovered.