Calypso: What the Negative Space Won't Say

Calypso started on a night walk through a construction site in downtown LA. A lot of the buildings had their lower sections boarded up — plywood panels covering the windows, painted black about three-quarters of the way up, with the raw wood left exposed at the top. I photographed one of them, thinking it would make a good backdrop for something, without knowing yet what that something was.

At the time I'd been experimenting with fragmented, negative-space shapes to build faces — cutting a face out of pieces the way that plywood was already cut into painted and unpainted sections. Calypso grew directly out of that experiment, using the photo as the starting point.

The heart in the center isn't decorative. I think of the piece as a body, with the heart doing the work a head normally would — the center of it, the thing everything else radiates out from. Paired with that unflinching gaze looking straight back at the viewer, it reads as serious, but sincere with it. A look of seriousness, love, and sincerity, all at once.

Calypso is available as a wood print, and the design also appears across the apparel and home goods collections.