Wide Awake : Artwork 5

A sun disc just cresting a horizon line, rendered at its most reduced — a perfect semicircle above a series of long, gently undulating wave bands that compress toward the lower edge of the frame. Nothing is superfluous. The piece works through restraint: the fewer the elements, the more the eye is forced to dwell on what each one means. In Japanese aesthetics this approach is called wabi — the beauty found in simplicity and incompleteness, the sunset as subject precisely because it is already leaving. The horizontal format and the strong tonal contrast between the solid disc and the open wave cutwork make this a piece for a wide dining room wall, a living room sofa span, or any interior where the quality of evening light is the register the room is designed around.