Working on the pages of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, I created blackout poems that through obscuration, illuminated a secondary reading, a distillation of the epic, hinting at but never naming the characters or plot line of the original. This became the grounds to explore the domestic, which is placed in opposition to the political. My training in painting informs this alternative approach to the practice of landscape painting, with particular influence derived from Whistler's Nocturnes. Using a vintage domestic knitting machine, I fused traditional fair isle knitting patterns that recontextualize the modernist study of the grid with the austere poetry created on the pages of the classic novel.