Today I Choose Palette Knives III - Original Painting

Acrylic on canvas, 26 x 36 x 1.75 inches, 2022 · Saturation Point collection

The title says it: this is the knife in charge. Broad blades of white and pale gray are dragged across a stained ground of charcoal, warm taupe, and antique gold, scraping and skipping over the weave so the color beneath keeps breaking through. The strokes radiate outward from the center, flaring into spatter and fine linear flicks at the edges where the knife lifted away. Stained passages pool softly at the corners while the knife work stays sharp and declarative — the whole composition caught in that moment between what the paint did on its own and what the hand insisted on. Dramatic, neutral, and endlessly easy to place. Wired and ready to hang.

Saturation Point is a body of work in which paint is allowed to sink into the canvas rather than sit on top of it. Thinned acrylic is flooded onto the surface and left to spread, pool, and bleed along the weave, soaking in until the color becomes part of the cloth itself. Over those stained fields Guererra works with large brushes and palette knives, sweeping opaque passages of white and light across the saturated ground. The two states hold each other in tension: one absorbed and uncontrollable, the other deliberate and physical.

"These paintings are about letting go. I flood the canvas with thinned paint and let it find its own way, then come back in with big brushes and palette knives and move across what's already there. I'm always chasing that point where the canvas is completely saturated and something has to give. The work lives right at that edge — between what I decided and what the paint decided." — Teodora Guererra