Scrolling through one of my art subreddits, I stopped cold on Jason Anderson’s Convene (2020). The painting pulled me in before I even had time to register why. At first, it seemed like nothing more than stacked rectangles of color. But as I lingered, the forms began to suggest a city on the edge of water—blocks of light rising against darkness, mirrored in trembling reflections below. The near-rainbow palette gives the impression of nightlife, the hum of human presence, a metropolis alive long after the sun has fallen. I could almost hear it: the chorus of footsteps, voices, laughter, and engines drifting upward like faint music. This is abstraction, yet it breathes.
The title, Convene, becomes the key to unlocking the work. To convene is to gather, to assemble, to come together with purpose. Each block of color is solitary, yet in their arrangement they form something larger, something communal. They do not blend into one another, nor are they isolated. They stand shoulder to shoulder, like members of a council or a choir, distinct yet resonant. Their reflections in the darkened water double the gathering—what convenes above convenes again below—as if this assembly of light is mirrored both outwardly and inwardly, in the city and in the soul.
Anderson achieves this through the disciplined use of the palette knife. The tool resists softness; it does not caress pigment into gentle transitions. Instead, it scrapes, deposits, and stacks. Each stroke leaves a block of color behind—sharp-edged, self-contained, luminous. These are not brushstrokes that fade into one another but slabs of brilliance, standing almost like stained-glass panes set against the cathedral of night. Even the reflections are knife-made, dragged downward in broken streaks, imitating the way light wavers across moving water. The medium itself insists on structure, yet paradoxically what emerges is not masonry but radiance: blocks of light, constructed and yet alive.
This tension between individuality and community, structure and shimmer, feels deeply psychological. In modern life, each of us exists like one of Anderson’s colors—singular, bounded, unblended. And yet, meaning arises only when we convene, when we stand beside one another and contribute to a larger chorus. To convene, in this sense, is not only to gather in space but to resonate together in spirit. The vitality I sense in this painting is not only the imagined hum of nightlife but also the echo of this human truth: we are most alive when illuminated in the presence of others.
The painting stirs a memory for me, one that feels like its real-world counterpart. I recall standing at Niagara Falls at night, watching as the cascade was lit by shifting colors. Deep blues gave way to radiant greens, then scarlets and golds, each hue pouring down the face of the water. The sheer force of the falls—constant, thunderous—became a screen for light itself, transforming an elemental force into a luminous spectacle. And then, as if the moment could not contain more, fireworks began. Explosions of flame and color burst over the river, spraying shards of brilliance across the mist. For a few minutes, water, light, and fire convened together, binding thousands of strangers into a single chorus of awe. The crowd gasped, cheered, and fell into collective silence, all of us gathered by a spectacle greater than ourselves.
That experience lives in Anderson’s Convene. The painting distills that same sense of assembled radiance, the same paradox of solidity and shimmer, the same hum of life that comes when light meets water and people meet one another. It is not only a cityscape or an abstraction—it is a meditation on what it means for colors, for people, for experiences to come together and form something greater than the sum of their parts.
Looking at Convene, I am reminded that life is itself a kind of gathering. Cells convene into bodies, people into cities, colors into paintings. To stand before this work is to recognize oneself as part of that same pattern: a luminous fragment among many, reflected in the waters of a shared world.