It Keeps Me Up At Night – 20”x 20” (51cm x 51cm) oil on gallery width panel (2025)
An exploration through still life of the things that keep us up at night, and the methods we use to counteract this. Reading before bed helps quiet a busy mind, eschewing the blue light devices that incite wakefulness; the pills are prescribed to quell ptsd-induced nightmares; the creased post-it note relaying a series of cryptic codes are abbreviations for mental health assessment tools; the whisky is a self-medicating sleep aid, but in fact achieves the opposite. The elements causing wakefulness are painted with their edges impinging on other areas with flicks of pigment, particularly the cell phone which emits literal, physical noise, but also psychic noise through the endless doom scrolling it invites.
Taking a closer look at the books and their subject matter, the “trilogy in 4 parts” is the iconic description of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a study in absurdism in response to the existential questions about life, the universe, and, well, everything. How do we grapple with the big questions that keep us up at night? On one hand, the silly madcap absurdism of it all, but buried within that is a kernel of nihilism that comes full bloom in the other featured book. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting describes the modern condition and one group’s reaction to it: the desire to numb, to dissociate and reject it all, topped, of course, with the signature vanitas still life element, a skull.
Even though “It Keeps Me Up At Night” has thicker whips and flicks of noisy edges applied directly with the palette knife, the base of it is layers. The pace and state of the modern world has made it hard to rest, hard to get a full, undisturbed night’s sleep, to slow down properly and wind things down to recharge. Working slowly and contemplatively in layers, waiting for paint to dry feels like an act of resistance, of not letting external (and sometimes internalized) forces frog march us along at a pace we’re not meant to sustain.