To beguile a moment of this vast season 2026 – 200 x 145cm, oil, acrylic on canvas
The title comes from Samuel Beckett novel How It Is, a phrase that holds the intimate and the cosmic in the same breath without allowing either to dominate. To beguile a moment: small, temporary, a minor diversion, the minimum gesture of presence against duration. Of this vast season: geological, indifferent, beyond any individual’s capacity to measure or outlast. The proposition is not consoling. It is simply accurate. A moment is what is available. The season is what surrounds it.
The painting began in 2024 as a large-scale field of khaki and olive, its surface organised by a grid of brown lines, the administrative geometry of zone mapping, the planning diagram imposed on land before use begins, and populated by flowers in various states of resolution: roses, anemones, peonies, tulip forms, scattered yellow and ochre blooms, each distinct, each occupying its position in the grid with the particular autonomy that the series has always insisted upon. The painting was set aside. In 2026 it was returned to, and a layer of deep purple/black oil was applied across the entire field, not evenly, not to cover, but to transform: pooling in the grid’s intersections, receding where the flowers most insistently occupied their ground, finding its own logic of transparency and opacity across a surface it was entering rather than replacing.
The result is a painting about what darkness does to a garden when the garden has been there long enough to resist complete submersion. The brown planning grid is still present but has been absorbed, visible as the skeleton of something the darkness has grown through, the administrative structure readable as archaeological substrate rather than as active organising principle. The flowers emerge from this layered field at varying degrees of resolution: the pink peony glows from the centre-left with a luminosity that the surrounding darkness intensifies rather than diminishes; the red rose holds its position in the upper left; the blue anemone in the lower centre has become the painting’s most concentrated point of light and specificity, its painted detail more visible precisely because the field around it has been deepened.
Other forms are half-consumed, present as suggestion, their colour surviving as a warm undertone beneath the dark surface. Others have nearly disappeared.
The vast season is also a geological season. The purple/black overlay connects this painting to the series’ most recent excavations, Extraction Zone, Your Laughter Crackles, the impasto masses that have been building across the 2026 works, but at a scale that makes the darkness environmental rather than localised.
The flowers beguile their moment within it not as symbols of resistance or hope but as the simple, irrefutable fact of their presence: still there, still glowing, still distinct, in a field that has done everything the field can do to make them otherwise.