Allied Artists of America National Online Exhibition
Sharp Cliff was chosen this March to be part of the 2025 114th Juried Allied Artists of America National Online Exhibition. It explores nature’s elusive edges—a meditation on boundary and transition, rendered through a delicate interplay of watercolor, ink, and encaustic mediums. The color flows and settles like mist, evoking the quiet tension between solidity and suspension.
The composition unfolds with a wash of blue tones that hover at the top, evoking sky or water in its softest state. From there, dark charcoal and deep black stretch downward in irregular, smoky veils. These shadows pulse with subtle gradients and textures, their smoky, cloud-like forms blurring the line between rock and atmosphere. On the right side, a pale yellow-cream section emerges as a quiet counterpoint—an unexpected brightness amid the deeper hues, reminiscent of light reaching across an unseen precipice.
Sharp Cliff focuses on the nuances of transition—the gentle yet persistent shifts in color and value that suggest movement and depth without fixed form. The inks and encaustic paints reveal possibilities to explore softness alongside density, opacity meeting transparency. Each layer acts as a discovery, allowing pigments to bleed and mingle, producing an organic fluidity that feels both deliberate and spontaneous.This piece is less about representation and more about evocation: a visual whisper of natural forces at play, the way mist clings to rock, or how water turns to stone and back again.
Sharp Cliff has subtle, shifting textures and the in-between spaces where color becomes atmosphere, and form dissolves. This work offers a space for reflection on edges, the quiet power of transformation, and the beauty in things unresolved.
