This piece is an interpretation of oceanic waves and jazz music. It has a lot of texture, with gold collage flecks that I saved and reused from old paint palettes.

I laid down color, scraped it back, and then built it up again, layering and shaping as I went. Along the edges, I piled leftover paint scraps and pressed shapes into the thicker areas for extra dimension. In some spots, I used a palette knife over stencils to leave raised textures, and in others, I used texture tools to shape the paint into peaks as I scraped through. I also scraped gold paint along the ridges so it would catch the light.

Although it wasn’t intentional, when I finished it, it reminded me a lot of Van Gogh’s Starry Night — that same kind of swirling, rhythmic movement through color and texture.