A Spy in the Valley of Love, 2026

Oil on Canvas
36 × 48 in

A Spy in the Valley of Love moves through intimacy as terrain: warm, shifting, unstable, and difficult to hold. Love appears less as a fixed condition than a landscape one passes through, shaped by proximity, distance, intensity, and erosion. The work holds the strange tension
between participation and observation — the feeling of being inside love while remaining slightly apart from it. Presence becomes unsettled, fluent yet incomplete, drawn toward warmth without fully rooting. Rather than treating instability as failure, the painting frames it as awareness: a recognition that some encounters exceed possession and leave only the trace of having moved through them.