Gallery Collection 61 - ‘Hand me the Brush’

Discover the artistry of ‘Hand me the Brush’. This one flips the whole series. Thick, sour yellow impasto covers the canvas, laid on heavy like buttercream icing. It is dragged, scraped, and lumpy. The paint has physical weight. But in the centre, a clean negative space reveals a small black figure of a child, arm raised, holding a brush. The yellow stops exactly at the edge of the silhouette. A child is painting the yellow, and the yellow is painting the child. Drips and smears of yellow land on the figure’s hand and clothes. The raw white canvas shows through only inside that child-shaped window. The rest is sealed under color.

Through a neurodivergent perspective, this is masking in reverse. Usually the mask is what you put on. Here, the mask is what gets put on you. The yellow is expectation. It is the “bright and happy” performance, the social rules and the demand to be easy. It is thick because that pressure is constant and physical. The child is your inner self, unfiltered. Small, stark, and still holding the brush. The figure is not trapped by the yellow. It is creating it. That is the brutal truth of masking. You learn to paint your own cage. The drips on the child’s hands say you cannot do this work without getting it on you. But the negative space says something else too. The real you is not gone. It is the exact shape of everything the world tried to cover up. This piece is not about hiding. It is about who is holding the brush.