Panda Landa "Beacon" Acrylic, Figurative Painting of a Hand in Water, Aqua and Gray, California Desert Art, Original 25 X 20 Inches, 2025

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A pale hand reaches down from a gray-brown mass at the upper left and touches a pool of aqua water, … Read more A pale hand reaches down from a gray-brown mass at the upper left and touches a pool of aqua water, a smudge of darker gray spreading beneath the fingertips like a shadow or a ripple. A small moon sits in a strip of black sky at the upper right. The paint is thin and chalky, laid on in soft strokes, and the palette is cool: aqua, slate, ash and a flesh tone barely warmer than the water. The gesture is tender and tentative. Panda Landa, who works in textile and film, paints with the same improvised, play-led attention, letting the image arrive without fuss. The painting sits in a black frame behind a white mat.

A quiet, landscape-format piece for a bedroom, a reading room or a calm corner of a living room. The aqua and slate tones suit white and pale gray walls, linen bedding, light oak and blue-green glass, and the black frame ties in with metal lamps and window casings. Hang it above a bed, a desk or a low console, or beside a window with soft daylight.

Acrylic, 25 x 20 x 1.5 in (63.5 x 50.8 x 3.8 cm). Framed in black, with a white mat.

The acrylic works are painted in thin, chalky layers with drawn line and softly scumbled color, and mounted behind a white mat in a black frame. Figures and gestures are reduced to a few clear shapes, such as a reaching hand, a profile or a hanging charm, set against fields of aqua, black and cream. They sit apart from the textile series but share its improvised, play-led way of working.

Panda Landa (b. 1982) is a queer, non-binary visual artist and filmmaker raised in the Nevada desert and now based in Joshua Tree, California. Self-taught, they work through instinct and improvisation, making mixed-media textile pieces from second-hand fabrics that are dyed by hand, stitched and stretched over frames. Sustainability is central to the practice, and every cloth arrives with its own history.

Their ongoing series, including PORTAL, ALTAR, ECLIPSE, VESSEL and RITUAL, touch on queerness, identity, ancestral narrative, healing and transformation, and more recent beaded panels carry short, tender phrases in color. Landa made the 2022 film In the Middle of Everywhere and has offered a workshop on giving new life to clothes at the Joshua Tree Music Festival. See less