Brine is an ongoing series of oil paintings examining the body as both subject and preserved object, figures submerged in fields of sour gold, lavender, and flesh, saturated in the conditions that have always surrounded them. The works take their name from the oldest method of preservation: salt and water, a solution that holds things at the edge of transformation, retaining the memory of freshness while suspending the possibility of change. Brine is not decay. It is the active maintenance of something that was never allowed to evolve.
The figures in Brine are unmoored, grasping, entangled, warm with proximity. They reach toward one another across a ground that offers no stable footing, no horizon, no divine authority to appeal to. The nude body here carries its own long history of preservation, centuries of mythological, religious, and art historical inscription that have determined what bodies mean, who they belong to, and what autonomy they are permitted. These figures inhabit that history without resolution, suspended between intimacy and isolation, tenderness and the sting of salt.
The series extends Waite's investigation into myth and religion as a single continuous human impulse, stories that encode social order and preserve it across generations, pickling the psyche long before the individual develops the capacity to question them. Somewhere in the preservation of these stories, touch became dangerous and need became shameful for the sons of these narratives, salted in early, passed down as covenant, and renamed courage. The golden light that saturates these paintings carries both warmth and warning, the color of something ancient, still faintly alive, held just at the threshold of change.