BENEDICTION is the welcome. Before a word is spoken or a door is opened, those oranges and yellows meet you warm & immediate.
It belongs in a building like EMME. A LEED Certified Gold space is built around intention, every material chosen, every system considered. A painting in that lobby should carry the same weight. Color that is alive. Art that earns its place.
Featured Work
BENEDICTION
This monumental painting — eight feet tall, eighteen feet wide — is a color field meditation rendered in the deep, incandescent language of oranges and yellows. Not simply warm hues, but the full emotional spectrum of those tones: the amber of late afternoon, the gold of something ancient, the orange of a flame that does not burn, only illuminates. In my Luministic practice, color is never decoration. It is presence. It is a living thing.
The title, Benediction, is both intentional and inevitable. A benediction is a blessing spoken at a threshold — and what is a lobby if not a threshold? It is the breath between the world outside and the life within. I wanted every person who crosses that threshold to feel, even fleetingly, that they are being met with grace.
BENEDICTION is permanently installed in the lobby of EMME — a LEED Certified Gold building in Chicago’s West Loop — and stands as a testament to what is possible when architecture, sustainability, and art are brought into genuine dialogue. With deep gratitude to Jennie Kalberer and Kelly Saito of Gerding Edlen Development, Elizabeth Fragoso of GREC Architects, and Ann Hudner of Hudner Strategies, whose vision made this collaboration possible.
To commission a building that breathes, and then to ask a painting to be its first breath — that is a rare and beautiful thing.
