"Inside Out — Tomato Soup" is the first painting in the Inside Out series, painted in 2021–2022. At its center sits an ornately patterned ceramic bowl — floral and star motifs tiling its interior, a decorative object the artist owned before it became something else: a tangible marker of the early transitional moments of the pandemic, the catalyst for the series that would follow.

The bowl is empty. What it should hold has become the world around it instead: the orange field filling the entire canvas is the tomato soup itself, spilled outward until it stops being contents and becomes the setting. Shaved parmesan and torn basil leaves drift loose across that expanse, the solid pieces of a meal now scattered through its own liquid, unmoored from the vessel that was supposed to hold everything together.

Weathered sea piles rise throughout the scene, an early and still unfixed use of a motif that would recur, and take on different meanings, in every painting that followed. Two small black birds appear among them — one perched low, on a pile in the lower left corner, the other higher up, on a pile in the upper left — distant, easy to miss, and the first appearance of the witness that would become a constant presence across the series. Unlike the birds in later works, which watch a specific collapse, a specific institution, a specific grief, these two seem to simply exist within the scene, undefined, waiting for the language around them to develop.

As the origin point of Inside Out, "Tomato Soup" carries none of the political or autobiographical specificity of the works that came after it. It is simpler, and in some ways more honest for that simplicity: a domestic object, once merely decorative, asked to hold the disorientation of a singular moment in time, painted at the exact instant its world became too large, too total, for the bowl to hold any of it back.

Rev. 07/2026

This painting was bought in 2025 by the New Haven Paint and Clay Club for their permanent collection