Toska

"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky (from The Brothers Karamazov)

"Toska" is a 24×36 canvas named for the longing that has no object, the grief that has no name, the weight of everything important that went unspoken. Carnations erupt outward in a pressurized bloom, years of silence finding the air at once, unbidden and inevitable.

In the Victorian language of flowers, every color carries its own quiet syntax, and here they blossom in unison. Red is the longing that survives its season, an admiration and love enduring far beyond the moment they might have been welcomed. Yellow is the sorrow of refusal, disappointment that seeps in like slow rust. White is mourning in its purest form, the bloom of remembrance, placed in the hands of the grieving and set upon the graves of all that was lost. Together they spell out the full sentence of a feeling never permitted to finish itself aloud, each unspoken word granted petal and hue and the sudden momentum of release.

The Circle of Fifths lays its gold geometry across everything, the mathematical skeleton of harmony, tension existing only in its reaching toward resolution. Unsaid things do exactly this, they generate a tension that keeps circling toward the note that would complete it, warm and patient and relentless, never quite arriving.

The embroidery trails unfinished through the bloom in two ways at once. The carnations themselves are only partially stitched, petals begun and abandoned before they could fully open, the flower held perpetually mid-formation. And the threads that move across the composition follow the same logic…some pulled taut into dense bright starbursts, others loose, set down mid-stitch, a sentence that stopped before it found its ending. Begun and set down, begun again, set down again. The unfinished thread is longing made textile, stitching toward an expression that kept dissolving back into silence before it could become sound.