Oil portraits painted from inside dark water — figures held at the point where the surface breaks, where breath, pressure and identity begin to give way. The grounds are mixed from Prussian Blue, Raw Umber and Phthalo Green: near-black, never black. Light refracts across faces that are neither rising nor sinking, but suspended between suppression and awakening.
Underwater the self stops defending its edges — separate from the world above, held still enough to start coming apart. What holds is the face, and the caustic light that finds it.
Six figures, one fall, told six times.
Each panel holds a different moment of letting go — the kick, the tumble, the slow turn, the surrender.
The panels were painted as one group. A single dark ground laid across all eight before any figure appeared, so the water stays the same water from panel to panel. Each pale body is then drawn up out of that dark in thin glazes, lit by a surface that never appears.
Not six paintings of falling. One fall, witnessed six times.
Dissolution exhibits at Northern Illumination, Far North Queensland, in 2026 — the paintings hanging beside the waters that shaped this practice's darkest register.
Where it began. Drift watched these waters from within the light — swimmers, surfaces, the world seen through water. Dissolution goes under, and stays.
Visit the origin series — Drift