The Space Between Us #03: the ghost in the paint

The Space Between Us #03 is a strange painting for me. For a long time I thought of it as unfinished, something half formed, something I had not taken far enough. But returning to it now, months later, I can see that I was wrong. It is not unfinished. It is transitional. And that is a very different thing altogether.

I painted this piece in early May. I was deep in the start of The Space Between Us series, still trying to find my rhythm again after Emerald City. I remember how difficult it felt. The painting resisted me in places. It felt wobbly and uncertain. Now I can see that this was because I was wobbly and uncertain too.

The original composition once had two figures in it. I wanted the closeness of two people, the thing the whole series is built around. But the second figure was wrong. Their face was wrong, their presence was wrong, the whole thing felt off. One day I simply painted them out. Not carefully, not thoughtfully, but in a quick instinctive moment of refusal. I removed them in one sweep of paint.

And then something unexpected happened.

Even though I erased them, their presence never left the painting. If you look carefully at the right side of the piece, you can still see the traces of the second person. The outline of an ear. A suggestion of cheekbone. A faint structure beneath the surface. A ghost.

The painting holds both presence and absence at the same time. It holds the figure who remains, and the figure who was removed. It holds connection and disconnection. It holds a gap, a space, a silence. At the time I thought this gap meant the work was incomplete. But now I can see that the gap is exactly the point. It is the visual weight of an emotional moment.

There is a tension in this piece that I have grown to love. The head leans left, but the right side of the canvas stays empty. There is imbalance and balance at once. The left side is full of marks, colour and movement, while the right side breathes. It is like a held breath, a pause between one idea and the next. The piece does not resolve itself, and that is why it is honest.

When I look at it now, it feels like a record of who I was at that point in the year. A painter in transition. Someone trying to find closeness but not quite reaching it. Someone grieving, searching, adjusting, shifting. Someone beginning a series without yet understanding what the series was really about.

Yesterday I realised that every painting in The Space Between Us is a kind of self portrait, even though none of the figures look like me. They are versions of myself reflected back through paint. If that is true, then this one is the version of me I was in May. The part of me that felt the gap. The part that felt the ghost. The part that was not fully ready to return to myself yet.

This piece is not unfinished. It is the exact right amount of finished. It shows the fracture before the connection. It shows the space before the closeness. It shows the discomfort before the flow began. It shows the ghost before it left.

It is a painting that had to stay this way.

And now, months later, I can finally see why.