Getty in Flux began with a walk through the Getty Center, where travertine walls and deep colonnades frame the sky like a series of thresholds. I photographed passages where structure, shadow, and one dark vertical form lined up, then used those images as raw material for five stages of abstraction.

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First, I traced shadows and structural edges onto separate sheets of tracing paper and layered them. As the planes overlapped, depth emerged from line alone. Next, I tested how to translate the site’s surfaces into marks, using ink washes, dry brush, charcoal hatching, and metallic gold to stand in for stone, sunlight, and the weight of the walls. I then combined these line and texture studies into prototypes on white, gray, and warm grounds to see how the same composition shifted with tone.

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The final series of nine studies, in charcoal, pastel, and collage on black and toned paper, pushes the abstraction furthest. The frames break apart and drift, while the vertical form stays in place, appearing as a solid in some studies and as a void cut from light in others. That reversal was the discovery for me: in architecture, what we read as solid and what we read as space can trade places depending on light. The series asks how much of a place can be stripped away while its feeling remains.