Thirteen paintings came out of last winter. All untitled, numbered I through XIII. Black and white, mixed media on canvas. That is the Concrete Winter series.
The studio is a concrete room on the water in Provincetown. No windows facing out. No heat that could hold against a Cape Cod winter. November 2025 through March 2026. Some mornings the temperature inside matched the temperature outside. You painted anyway, because that is what was happening.
The work is not about hardship. The paintings are too composed for that reading. They are about structure and fracture. Figures that hold their form under pressure, or break. You can read it either way. The palette is strict. Black and white removes the escape route of color and leaves weight, edge, and mark. Every decision is visible.
The series started loose in November. By December the compositions had tightened. Figures became more architectural. Surfaces started building up, layer on layer, holding tension without releasing it. By January there was an internal logic that had not existed in October. Cold slows paint. It slows you. You make fewer marks, and they have to count.
They are dense paintings. Not in scale, most running 36 to 48 inches, but in what they carry. They were made in a room that did not want to be comfortable, and the work reflects that. Not dramatically. Just in the weight of the surface, the compression of the image.
Thirteen pieces over four months. They arrived with more coherence than expected. Not a narrative sequence, but a body of work with its own internal consistency. Structure, fracture, figuration, control under tension. The studio was the condition. The work is the outcome.