"This work from 2018 presents the six thresholds as details lifted from an architectural plan. The indent-section of each shape refers to the threshold space, between one room, and stepping into the next...here aligned in - I think - the most friendly way.

Subtitled ‘las meninas’ —at the time I had recently seen the Velasquez in Madrid. That sense of the posture of the young girls and the dog spatially left to right... it was a personal subtitle, a tribute to that particularly important painting.

These are gouache forms on gouache ground. Gouache has a particular attribute that is sometimes wonderful and sometimes a challenge. Unlike watercolor, it re-dissolves when painting a second or third coat. Here, grey was embedded in the watercolor paper, densely, and when completely dry, I began the set of six. With each pass of color, a very slight amount of grey would wash up into the brush; any later coat would also start to lift and activate the earlier layers.

That sense of stacking, and the sequence and rhythm of the horizontal marks, occurs in earlier works on paper, and also measures space. One is in a sense looking at miniatures of a kind of flooring...that's one possible read."

—Julia Fish, 2026