2025

Whirling Earth, oil on canvas, 60 × 72 inches, 2025

Somatic, oil on canvas, 48 × 48 inches, 2025

River Song Braiding Through Silence, oil on canvas, 40 x 36 inches, 2025

Downwinder, oil on canvas, 40 x 36 inches, 2025

Night-Dawn-Day-Dusk, oil on canvas; 180 x 72 inches, 2025

A monumental triptych, Night-Dawn-Day-Dusk unfolds as a vibrant abstracted landscape moving through temporal states, echoing planetary cycles. The painting exists as a non-place, an imagined or reimagined memory, where instinctive mark-making manifests as a visual record of form in flux. Throughout the painting, vignettes reveal the visual interplay between flat abstraction and naturalistic arrangements. The title itself suggests the cyclical nature of time. It also acknowledges concepts of cultural balance. Abstract compositions can mirror the structure of indigenous systems that are nonlinear, relational, and interconnected. For example, color may allude to sacred directions, or times of day. Time may be conveyed as a moving splash of color rather than a line, and spatial arrangements may reflect constellations or spaces of meditations. Rather than presenting a singular viewpoint, abstraction invites multiple readings, mirroring the layered ways in which knowledge is held and transmitted.

Moreover, abstraction, in its resistance to fixed form and literal representation, opens a space for what can be imagined, remembered, or intuited rather than seen. In Indigenous contexts, particularly within Diné (Navajo) thought, abstraction is not a departure from reality but a means of accessing a deeper, layered reality that includes memory, ceremony, cosmology, and ancestral knowledge. It can function as a visual language for the unseen: the movement of wind across a mesa, the shape of a prayer, or the cyclical rhythm of time as experienced through seasons, light, and land.

Flux Abyss, oil on canvas, 84x120 inches, 2025

Flux Abyss is part of a series of landscape paintings created entirely from imagination. These works, marked by a surreal and abstract quality, invite chance, intuition, and discovery to shape visual experiences that echo familiar geologic forms in states of transformation.  Lines, shapes, and repetitive motifs evolve organically, allowing unpredictable elements to find their place. Rocks, rivers, flora, and fauna emerge as indiscernible yet resonant shapes, creating landscapes that blur the boundaries between the tangible and the imagined.

My work emerges from a deep reverence for the natural world, not only for its beauty but for the ways it informs a sense of spirituality. Through abstraction, I explore the intersection of nature’s physical forms and its enigmatic depths seeking to convey the rhythms, tensions, and harmonies that connect us to the living earth.

At the heart of my practice is the idea that abstraction serves as a bridge between the seen and the unseen. Nature, with its endless layers of meaning and materiality, mirrors the principles of superposition; states of being that are both distinct and intertwined. My paintings are meditative spaces, where the act of creation becomes a spiritual practice, and the resulting works become portals for exploring identity, memory, and the sacred.

 -Steven J. Yazzie