"Inside Out — Hot Cocoa" is the second painting in the Inside Out series, painted in 2021–2022. At its center sits a Chelsea FC mug — a personal object rather than a symbolic one, carried home from the office in March of 2020 when the pandemic sent everyone away from their desks, and never returned. The mug's interior is dark, nearly black, a void so complete it reads like a small black hole — a point of absolute stillness pulling in whatever light comes near it, giving nothing back.

What the mug should hold has become the world around it instead: the warm, rust-toned field filling the canvas is hot cocoa itself, spilled outward until it stops being contents and becomes the setting. Marshmallows drift loose across that expanse, unmoored from the cup that was meant to hold them. Sea piles rise throughout the scene, an early and still unfixed use of the motif, offering the same quiet, useless orientation they would come to represent differently in later work. A single black bird perches on one of the piles near the handle, a small and easy-to-miss witness, present from nearly the very beginning of the series.

There is something fitting in that black hole at the mug's center — a container so dark inside that it seems to have no bottom, no visible limit to how much it could take in, and yet nothing comes back out of it. Painted at the outset of a change in working life that had no precedent, the mug stands in for a shift no one chose and few expected to be permanent: the moment an ordinary object, taken home for what felt like a short while, quietly became a marker of an era's end — its insides gone quiet and unreadable, the way so much of that period was.

07/2026