In Blue Racers, Ariel Parkinson fuses myth and movement into a single, fluid image. The composition feels almost stage-like—an unfolding drama of coiling forms and shifting light, where sea and sky, plant and creature seem to merge. The painting’s surface churns with motion: spiraling blues, serpentine tendrils, and bursts of yellow and green evoke both natural energy and the symbolic gestures of mythic storytelling.

Parkinson’s background as a scenographer and poet reveals itself in the work’s sense of choreography. Each element seems to perform—branches twist like dancers mid-turn, waves curl as if taking a breath. Her forms, while abstract, feel inhabited by mythic presences, the “racers” themselves suggesting both serpents and spirits, agents of transformation in a space where narrative and nature are indistinguishable.

The palette, dominated by deep oceanic blues and tempered with earthen ochres, situates the painting within an elemental world. Layers of translucent paint give the surface the feeling of something weathered, seen through time—like an ancient fresco exposed to air after centuries underground.

For Parkinson, painting was a continuation of language. Blue Racers reads as a visual poem, where color and rhythm replace words, and where myth functions not as story but as atmosphere—a space through which the viewer must move slowly, like entering a dream already in motion.