"Inside Out — Squares" (2026) takes its name from Oatmeal Squares, the Quaker Oats cereal that inspired it — another entry in the small cluster of Inside Out paintings built around simple, familiar comfort foods, alongside "Tomato Soup" (2022), "Hot Cocoa" (2022), and "Café" (2025). At its center sits an ornate ceramic bowl, its interior patterned in concentric black linework, left otherwise empty in keeping with the series' consistent grammar: the container holds nothing, and what it should hold has escaped into the world around it. The bowl is a companion to the one in "Tomato Soup" — the same decorative object returning years later, carried forward from the piece that started the series into one of its most recent entries.

That world is milk — the white field filling the canvas, standing in for the bowl's absent contents at full scale. Across its surface drift the cereal squares themselves, along with scattered blueberries and sliced strawberries, the whole breakfast loosed from the bowl and scattered as far as the edges of the canvas, and beyond. Sea piles rise throughout the scene, casting long teal shadows across the milk — the same motif that runs through the entire series, here as quietly present and as load-bearing as anywhere else.

A small pelican floats near the lower right, beside a buoy marked with a yellow flag — quiet and easy to overlook, the witness present in even this most domestic corner of the series.

Like its comfort-food companions, "Squares" carries the same weight the rest of Inside Out carries — the struggle to stay steady in a world that offers every marker of orientation and still leaves you adrift — even here, in a bowl of breakfast cast wide across the canvas.

Rev. 07/2026