Palmetto Frond I

A study in botanical stillness, Palmetto Frond I renders the sweeping architecture of a tropical leaf in gold against canvas, the finish casting a luminous, almost ceremonial weight onto an otherwise elemental subject. The square format — a disciplined thirty-one and a half inches in each direction — gives the composition a medallion-like self-containment, neither landscape nor portrait but something more resolved. It is the kind of work that reads differently in morning light than in evening candlelight, the gold leaf surface shifting with the room rather than imposing upon it.