David Koi

Essays

Portraits of Four

An incomplete series of four paintings.

Close view of glossy black ridges lying over a burnt orange ground.

Four of us. Three paintings so far. Each one abstracted from a photograph taken at one of our weddings.

Four men in dark suits standing shoulder to shoulder at an indoor wedding reception, one wearing an orange boutonniere.Four men in dark suits on a deck at sunset, marsh grass and open water behind them.Four men in dark three-piece suits and green bow ties standing together indoors before a wedding.

These days, I feel fucking old. I spend time in my memories and feel in my bones how much time has gone by. Passing days only add to building pressures in the mind. Shames from the actions of a younger self sitting unresolved.

I miss my friends.

I miss my family.

I miss my Friend.

None of you are getting the painting of their own day. These are not souvenirs. As a man does not need to be handed back a day he already owns. He should be proudly remembered for standing up at somebody else's.

So that is what these are. Not a record of three weddings, but a record of the four of us. On days when we showed up for one another. A thread of connection to remind us of what we've had all along.

After the Ceremony

Oil on a gypsum, gesso and modeling paste ground over primed canvas. 24 × 36 in. 2026.

After the Ceremony on a studio wall: four figures in white shirts and dark formalwear, their heads rendered as a red-pink mask, an orange ringed eye, a blue head and a violet head.

Stand close. Closer than you would with other people in the room.

A surface was built before any paint went on it. Gypsum for body, gesso and modeling paste for binder, worked over a pre-primed canvas.

Getting that mix right took a few tests. Too little binder and the material cracked as it dried and went brittle under a fingernail. One whole test panel fractured. Too much and the texture flattens out and you have lost the reason for doing it at all. The foundation of this painting is the ratio that survived.

A sheet of paper carrying three thick white swatches labelled by hand: heavy body modeling paste with spackle, gesso with spackle, and all three combined. The middle swatch has dried with cracks running through it.

There were other experiments. Different application methods, different drying times. A heat gun to force the drying. One patch I set on fire. It blistered and blackened. The fumes adding to a cumulative toxic exposure which I'm becoming all too familiar with these days.

A white textured test panel with a scorched, blistered brown patch where a heat gun and an open flame were used on the surface.The finished ground on canvas, still wet, worked into broad ridges and knife sweeps with a torn irregular edge.

Then the paints went on top, thick.

Now find the orange.

A burnt sienna layer went down first and everything after it was laid over the top, and where the upper paint cracked and pulled and left gaps, the orange comes back up through them. It is not painted on. It is what is left where the surface fissured. Opening between ridges. Caught in the spaces the brush could never reach.

Close view of black crusted ridges with bright orange opening between them.Square close view of an orange field broken up by dark glossy ridges of paint.Close view where smooth white paint meets a black crusted field, orange burning through every fissure.

Step back and the ridges resolve.

Four figures. White shirts, dark formalwear. A pink mask crossed by dark bands. An orange figure glowing with an internal light, with a section removed to show the brilliance within. A blue mask with no discernible facial features, dense with emotion. A violet figure turned to profile, its features cut in rather than painted on.

Upright close view of the red-pink head, crossed by two dark bands, against black crusted paint with orange in its cracks.Upright close view of the orange concentric eye with a yellow centre, a pale wing shape cutting across it.Upright close view of the blue head, orange showing through a network of cracks across its surface.Upright close view of the violet head in profile, its features cut in with dark strokes and lit orange along the cracks.

Two of them are dense and sit forward. Two are dissolving into what is behind them.

A pencil sketch on newsprint of four figures with their arms around each other, heads drawn as plain ovals with almost no features.

I gift After the Ceremony to my brother Ryan.

Blue #1

Oil and safflower gel medium on canvas. 24 × 36 in. 2026.

Blue #1: a deep blue field crossed by a diagonal band of crusted silver and black, small orange marks surfacing through it.

It begins orderly at the top left. Then it ripples out into something different entirely.

That is if you can see it. This one changes depending on where you put it and how it's lit.

On a cloudy afternoon with the lights off it is a dark blue block, near black, with bits of burnt sienna coming up through it. That's nearly all you get. In an ordinarily lit room, some of the layers surface and you begin to see what lies within. Light it deliberately, directly, and the whole thing comes forward at once.

Close view of the calmer upper left, smooth blue strokes over visible canvas weave with a bright highlight at the top.Square close view of long blue diagonal strokes, the canvas weave reading clearly through thin paint.Close view of the textured diagonal, where crusted silver ridges sit over blue and small orange flecks show through the weave.

In the act of displaying the piece, you become a contributor to the final artwork. A painting with an off switch.

It started as a wash. Oil thinned down with paint thinner and pushed around until the canvas was a fog of color. While that was still wet I drew the four of us into it. Caricatures, really. Eyes as arcs, four big stupid grins, done fast and only there to work out where everybody should sit.

The first layer of Blue #1: thinned orange and ochre paint across the canvas with blue at the edges, and four caricature faces drawn into the wet paint in grey-blue.

Then I kept building. The paint itself got more interesting to me than the representations. And so I followed the paint. Layer after layer went over those faces until there was nothing of them left to see.

I never took them off. They are still under there.

Safflower gel medium, mixed loosely into the paint. The gel holds the momentum of the brush strokes. Suspending pigments in time.

Twenty paints went into this painting and none of them were pre-mixed on the palette. The work of mixing the paints is left to your eye.

Close view of a single orange mark surrounded by dark blue and a rim of pitted silver crust.Upright close view of yellow and pale green streaks running diagonally through blue, with a silver ridge above them.Close view where the blue turns violet and bronze, thick ridges of paint broken by yellow and teal.

The orange under this one and the orange under After the Ceremony are the same idea. Both paintings are warm underneath and cool on top. Both of them give the warmth back only where the top layer breaks, or where the light drops far enough to let it.

It remains a portrait because we know it to be one.

I gift Blue #1 to Abhi.

Display Room

Oil on canvas. 24 × 36 in. 2026.

Display Room on a studio wall: a tipped blue vessel, a magenta form and a yellow-green ovoid on stands, and a dark teal shape like a folded umbrella, against pale blue and cream.

This did not start as shapes. I sketched your faces. Then I drew the sketch again, more abstract than the last one. Then again from that one, and again from that. My emotional feeling of each person nudging each iteration.

First charcoal sketches for Display Room on toned paper: rough boxes with four forms standing on plinths.A page of Display Room sketches on toned paper, four shapes drawn above a row of narrow V-shaped stands.Four further Display Room composition studies laid out in a quadrant grid on white paper.
A cleaner Display Room iteration on toned paper: a shield form, a rounded square, an oval and a diamond, each on its own stand along a baseline.The final Display Room sketch: a tipped vessel at the left on its own stand, two rounded forms sharing a base at the centre, and an angular shape at the right.

What came out the other end: a round yellow-green mass, a magenta form leaning forward, a shape of sharp edges and points in dark teal, and a blue vessel tipped back on itself. The yellow-green and the magenta share a stand, close enough to touch. The teal has a pedestal to itself. The blue one is the only one whose edge is cut by another.

Every object carries some yellow in it. The colour reflecting off of all the rest.

Colour took as long as shape. I tested through twenty-four paints, cutting each one through a value scale with white to see how it would look when muted.

A canvas pad swatched with twenty-four oil paints, reds and pinks in the upper rows, yellows and blues below, each colour repeated underneath cut with white.

Then two full studies at nine by twelve before the real one. One of them I liked and did not use.

A nine by twelve oil study for Display Room: a tipped blue vessel, a dark red rounded form, a yellow-green ovoid and an angular teal shape on stands drawn in blue line.An alternative nine by twelve study for Display Room, the four shapes painted flat and angular against bare canvas over pencil construction lines.

The paint went on thick. A full 150ml tube of titanium white went into this painting.

A gloved hand holding a completely flattened 150ml tube of titanium white oil paint in front of a Display Room study.

You float down an endless hallway. Passing identical doors.

You select one at random. The door struggles open on hinges seized from disuse.

Inside is blindingly bright. The room indescribably large. A floor pushing off into infinity. Meeting a wall which rises to a terminus out of sight.

In the room sit four objects. Supernaturally dense in their vibrancy.

They are turned away. Facing one another, locked in conversation.

Your eyes adjust in time to catch the motion.

Together, all four turn to you.

From out of the canvas, these four will look back out at you. Studying you as you study them.

Upright close view of the magenta form, its edge lit yellow and orange, built from long streaked palette strokes.Upright close view of the teal shape, pale ribs on one side and deep green-black on the other meeting at a sharp fold.
Close view of the blue vessel, its curved rim sweeping around a dark brown interior.

I gift Display Room to Bernard.

Eight months later. Here's the final day of varnishing.

Fourth painting not yet started. We've all got one more picture to stand in.

Hope you all enjoy your paintings. Let's catch up soon.

The artist in a full-length studio mirror wearing a respirator mask and a paint-covered shirt, surrounded by canvases and packing material on the final day of varnishing.