A Hole in the Earth - Virginia Cohn Parkum, c. Unknown

A Hole in the Earth is almost disarmingly simple: a dark field, a bruised violet ring, and at the center a white opening that reads at once as absence and invitation. Yet the longer you stay with it, the less it behaves like an abstract design and the more it feels like a decision—something Parkum has arrived at after all the earlier noise of bodies, history, outrage, and witness.

The painting is built around a single gesture that keeps repeating itself: the circular sweep. You can see the hand in the arc—layer on layer, as if the ring had to be worried into existence. The purple isn’t decorative; it has the weight of something worked-through, like a chant or a worn path. The brushwork turns the surrounding black into a kind of atmosphere—less “background” than enveloping darkness, the sort that doesn’t threaten so much as insist: this is where we begin, and where we return.

The white center is the key and the risk. Parkum leaves it open and unillustrated, refusing the comfort of explanation. That void can be a tunnel, a portal, a grave, a mouth, a moon, a blown-out light. It can also be the most literal reading of the title: earth removed, a cavity made. What’s striking is how cleanly it’s held—like the painting’s entire purpose is to protect that opening from being filled in. The ring acts as both frame and threshold: it contains the hole while also guiding you toward it.

In the context of Parkum’s broader work—so often crowded with strained figures, moral urgency, and the mess of the world—this feels like a last page with no text on it. Not an erasure of what came before, but a release from it. A body of work that has wrestled so much with suffering arrives here at a form that admits a different kind of truth: that there is a point where language, outrage, and even narrative stop being adequate. What remains is passage.

That’s where the signature matters. She signs this one “Gin,” the name she reserved for her spiritual and Buddhist works, and the choice reads as a quiet instruction on how to approach the image. This is not just an optical “hole”; it’s a meditation object—an emblem of emptiness that isn’t nihilism, but clarity. In Buddhist terms, the void is not simply nothingness; it’s the space in which grasping loosens. The painting doesn’t demand that you interpret the opening as death or salvation—it simply holds the possibility of both, and asks you to breathe in front of it.

There’s also something unmistakably valedictory in the way the piece is staged. The surrounding darkness is not punctured by multiple lights—only this one. It can be read as a light at the end of the tunnel, yes, but the title keeps tugging it back toward earth: burial, return, the body going down. Parkum lets those meanings coexist without melodrama. If this is a farewell, it’s not sentimental. It is the steadier kind: the acceptance that the passage is real, that the opening is there whether we name it or not.

What makes A Hole in the Earth feel like an ending is its refusal to bargain. There are no figures asking to be saved, no scene to decode, no social world to argue with. Just the threshold. The painting sits like a final bow—one gesture, repeated until it becomes calm—suggesting that after everything she has seen and carried, Parkum’s closing act is to offer a way through: a gateway that could be the end, or the beginning, or simply the peace of letting go.