Entitled “Letters to the Void,” the show is a series of abstract paintings the artist created in response to the passing of his wife Maria after an extended battle with cancer.

“It was only a few days after she passed away,” Twait said. “I went back out to the art studio and was gonna just do something, you know? Maybe work on a landscape or – I didn’t really know what I was gonna do.”

“I had the radio going and I was just painting words I heard from the radio and just kind of came up with a technique. And I noticed I was picking really sad words. Like really everything seemed to have a meaning to it. Sort of a mysterious meaning. It kind of turned into messages. It seemed like I was always talking to Maria in my head.”

“And so I started talking to her through the canvas and it just kind of became what I did every day for a while. In the morning. And this is kind of just what came out of it.”

The 4 Pillars Gallery is hosting an exhibit of paintings by Brainerd artist Eric Twait that serves as a meditation on grief.

Twait said his sister-in-law stopped by one day to check on him and asked what he was working on. He said he told her it was either the best thing he had ever done or the worst, he didn’t really know.

“And she started crying as soon as she saw it. So I was like, okay. I knew I had got something going on here,” he said.

Twait said the act of confronting his own grief eventually led to a change in his approach to painting.

“I just couldn’t be that deep in the grief for my whole life,” he said. “You know, I had to, like, get out of it, and I knew I had to get out of it.”

What emerged was a series of paintings he called “A Ruckus Return to Happiness.” Twait said as his mood changed so did the size of the works.

Three paintings by Eric Twait from his “Letters to the Void” series.

“I think almost at this point it was like the size of the emotion I was feeling was influencing the size of the painting,” he said. “I found these great big stencils, almost like city workers might put, parking stuff, you know, like no parking or something.” The technique involved starting with larger words that would then fade out as he went over them with other letters and expressions, creating the effect of an optical illusion, he said.

He also created an interactive piece using magnetic paint that viewers can engage with.

“I’m hoping people will go and put their own messages on here. Maybe names or what they are feeling, like some past trauma, or they’re experiencing grief,” he said.

Twait created a Facebook page where viewers can upload a photo of their letter via a QR code.

“Letters to the Void” is Twait’s first solo art exhibition. He said he came across 4 Pillars Gallery by chance one day passing through on his way from Brainerd to visit his parents in Iowa.

The third painting in Eric Twait’s “A Ruckus Return to Happiness” series. The painting is hanging in the 4 Pillars Gallery at The Grand through Sept. 12.

“This is, like, the halfway point for me, so I needed to stop, and New Ulm’s a pretty cool town, so I thought I’d walk around. And I was just walking downtown, and I saw the Four Pillars Gallery. And so I went in and got their information, and then when I got back home, I applied,” he said.

The show at 4 Pillars Gallery runs through Sept. 12. The Gallery is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Twait used magnetic paint in this interactive piece to encourage viewers to create a message they could post on the Facebook page he made.