08/21/2026
Emma Gray EmmaGrayHQ approaches painting as an elemental process of continual becoming, allowing portrait and landscape to dissolve into one another through revision, intuition, and temporal layering.
Following a thread from Kenneth Anger’s montage and cinematic dissolve to Catherine Corman’s Super 8 camera as a mechanism for bringing the past into the present, Gray carries these transmutations of time and image into the surface of the painting itself. Here, image persistence becomes a way of seeing. From a distance, a painting may appear to be flowers, a mountain, or a landscape. Look longer, and other figurations begin to emerge. A spirit hovering above a mountain may nearly disappear beneath another passage of paint, yet remains barely visible, still inhabiting the image. Elsewhere, a leaf gives way to the fleeting presence of tiny nymphs or nature spirits, as though the landscape itself were becoming animate, with flora, fauna, and spirit collapsing into a single image.
The painting becomes a kind of temporal layering, one image occupying the space of another, one state becoming another while retaining traces of what came before. Like Anger’s transubstantiation of jewels into nourishment, or Corman’s transformation of the present city through the historical apparatus of Super 8, Gray allows the material itself to become the mechanism of change.
Paint follows its own natural gravity. It drips, merges, is buried, removed, and returned. Nothing holds its edge for long. What remains beneath the surface becomes part of what we see.
– Saul Appelbaum Saul Appelbaum
Photography Yubo D**g Yubo - ofstudio photography
