Floating Past

Floating Past 36×36×2 inch acrylic and graphite on cradled wood panel

Floating Past is one of four related panels made concurrently — cousins in color, composition, and language, each distinct in its own character. The work draws on principles of composition, value, color, texture, and imagination, built through layers that accumulate, converse, and sometimes argue with each other.

Embedded in the warm, dense field are figures adapted from 12,600-year-old prehistoric rock art discovered in the Colombian Amazon in 2017. These ancient images have become part of an ongoing visual vocabulary — carried forward into new contexts, still moving. Scattered across the surface are the artist's initials, E J B 3, quiet markers of presence within the accumulated imagery.

The title holds more than one meaning: the past floating into the present through ancient marks and remembered forms, and a more personal current — the memories, feelings, textures, and reactions that flow through the making of a painting, not always consciously, not always named.