Without Embrace [ 18” x 24” ]· Carbon pencil and blackening watercolors made from captured industrial carbon, with inks on paper mounted to canvas · [ 2020–2025 ]
The mask of relationship and the refusal to fully connect.
This painting is an anti-painting to Egon Schiele’s Embrace. Where Schiele’s figures claw and fuse in desperate union, here two lovers lie in the same bed but remain rigidly apart. He sits upright against the headboard, arms motionless. She reclines lower, body angled away, arms locked behind her back, hands clasped tightly. Their eyes do not meet. The space between them is only inches, yet feels vast. The bed is a quiet battlefield — creased sheets and blackening drips trailing from her elbows, pooling like withheld breath. The drips spread slowly, blurring the boundary between their bodies and the linen. There is no embrace, only the quieter refusal: not turning, not reaching, not closing the gap. The blackening layers echo the slow accumulation of distance.
A meditation on restraint, self-containment, the cost of withholding in the most intimate of spaces, and the enduring optimism that persists when we face the distance we create even in bed—dark yet eternally hopeful in its refusal to let the embrace be forever impossible.
Studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com
Inspiration & Personal Connection
This painting draws inspiration from Egon Schiele’s raw and electrically charged depictions of lovers, but explores the opposite psychological territory.
Originally painted during the painful unraveling of a relationship — at the same time I was discovering my first health consequences from 9/11 — *Without Embrace* captures the quiet ache of lying beside someone while feeling profoundly separate. There is still sexual tension in the air — bodies close enough to feel the heat, yet arms locked, bodies angled away, the small space between them heavy with hesitation, desire, and withheld touch. It became a deeply personal meditation on the slow accumulation of emotional distance, the vulnerability of closeness without connection, and the quiet courage it takes to stay open when everything inside wants to close.
The blackening layers trace the gradual build-up of restraint, unspoken grief, and self-protection. Yet even in this moment of stillness and refusal, a faint gleam catches on the curve of an elbow or the open palm — a subtle reminder that the embrace is not forever impossible.
Studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com
Dark yet hopeful.
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Egon Schiele “Embrace” 1917