This is the newest piece in my hand-painted Ensō collection, and the first one I have painted on commission for a private family. It is acrylic on a 30 by 48 inch canvas, and like everything else in the collection it begins with one honest circle and a rising sun.

Title	Coastal Space
Series	Ensō Collection
Medium	Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions	30 × 48 in (76 × 122 cm)
Artist	Grant Nieddu
Signed	Recto, and verso on the stretcher
Orientation	Horizontal · gallery-wrapped, painted edges
Provenance	Commissioned · private family collection

Looking through the circle

Look through the white ring and you are standing at the water’s edge at daybreak. The sun is coming up right on the humid horizon, a low disc of white-hot light laying a broken gold path back across the water toward you. Above it, the morning clouds loom and streak, catching the orange and throwing it back in coral and rose. The sea moves in bands of aqua and gold, and a single wave curls and breaks along the shore, spending itself on a strip of sand the color of wine and iron.

The fine white splatter over the whole thing reads two ways at once for me: sea-spray thrown off the surf, and the last stars that have not quite burned off in the light. I painted a black and silver double border straight onto the canvas so the whole scene reads like a window you are looking out of.

Overview of the Ensō Collection

Coastal Space is part of my hand-painted exploration of the Ensō, which I make as a meditation for my own ADHD. In Zen, “an ensō is a circle that is hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create.” Each piece begins with playful, intuitive color. The ensō is almost always the final stroke, and once it is down I am forced to accept the piece exactly as it turned out, which relieves me of my obsessive perfectionism.

How This Neuro-Art Helps Me With My ADHD

This is what I have come to call ADHD neuro art: a kind of therapeutic art-making where the process matters as much as the finished canvas. The layered spray that builds the sky, the rhythm of flung splatter, and above all the one held breath of the ensō stroke are all acts of self-regulation for me, a way of gathering a fast, busy mind into a single ordered, present moment. The circle is what focus looks like when it finally lands.

Painting this one for a family to live with changed what the circle was doing. I left the ensō open on purpose. An open circle is a threshold, a way in and a way through, and hung in a family’s home I want it to read like exactly that: the door is open, the day is beginning, and one clear breath is enough to start it.

Where Coastal Space sits, among its peers

For a sense of where a piece like this lands, here are a few contemporary ensō-and-seascape works offered on the international market right now, next to Coastal Space’s dimensions.

Work	Size	Asking
Anne Robin — Big Sun in Brittany	31.5 × 31.5 in	$1,861
Andrii Kovalyk — A Golden Peach, Romantic Evening by the Sea	39 × 32 in	$4,270
Côte d’Azur Sunset (Saatchi Art)	17.7 × 21.7 in	$706
Grant Nieddu — Coastal Space (original acrylic)	30 × 48 in	Commissioned

The paint process on Coastal Space

A few shots from the build, from the first black ground and teal spray in the garage to the horizon blocked in on the easel, before the ensō ever went down.