Most landscape painters are cowards trying to sell you an open window. I refuse. In the Woods, V21 is a locked room. Using Wolf Kahn’s "back wall" theory, I didn't paint a forest; I built a rigid, inescapable bunker. By establishing a strict floor, ceiling, and back wall mapped entirely from the specific hues of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the background becomes a suffocating, unyielding cage holding the rest of the composition hostage.

​Then, I deliberately sabotaged it. Enter Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. That stark white horizon line cutting across the piece isn't polite negative space—it is a catastrophic mechanical failure. It is a purposeful silkscreen misprint acting as a scalpel, slashing the canvas wide open to let the raw, blinding light hemorrhage through. The image is intentionally broken to let the radiation out.

​Richard Freeman’s underlying drawing was butchered using Matisse's paper cutout theory, leaving the foreground as nothing but floating, Fauvist shrapnel. As Larry Poons warned us, human memory is a decaying fraud. You don't remember the light hitting the gardens at the Crabtree House. This piece doesn't let you try. It forces you to stare directly into the mechanical fracture, drowning your retina in the exact, radioactive tone of the sunbeam before it vanishes. Boom. It's fresh again.

​Read the full composition mechanics and structural breakdown of this work here: