36x36 Acrylic, art resin, glitter. Ready to hang.
Still, the opulent beauty of a rainbow contrasted with the powerful but likely destructive force of a volcano, over the Ocean because why not? This combination represents the balance between opposing forces in nature or life, and the potential for both harmony and chaos to coexist. Where the grounded permanent structures of old meet the fleeting prisms of thought and light, all cast over water, which is always metaphorically the emotional aspect of life here, as this.
How calm and grounded can I stay through this upheaval? A process that feels violent but unfamiliar, where I am unsure and often overwhelmed but not in a panic. Like giving birth, and not realizing that I would be, again. Free is only for the fearless, as I read in a carefully chosen font over a movie trailer yesterday. Balancing harmony and chaos. Freedom with fear. A juxtaposition of opposites as the world erupts into further mayhem, and I eat oatmeal for breakfast, avoiding the news.
On any given day I can be a rainbow, a volcano, or just the dust between the two as everything I ever believed in shifts. I try not to lose myself in keeping up or paying attention (at the cost of my well-being.)
I don’t have money for all of the crap that I was brainwashed into thinking I needed to buy to distract myself from the way that I felt but somehow. I feel calmer. More real. I am more in control of what I invest my emotional state of being into and what I am willing to consume, as simultaneously the ways that I went places, and cared about being at things evaporates.
How beautiful is it, really? Living long enough to get to the other side of the chaos. Then growing into the ability to turn it all into something new, something of value, something that speaks, without speaking? Only color and light and letters and soul. Often kicking, often screaming. But in the end, doing the thing I’ve been saying I would do my entire life. With no idea how, and no idea what will happen next.
I just listen to A&W over and over and over and bend light into art in my little living room. With my hope and scars and headphones and stories.
The full spectrum of experience, absence, and the transformation required to give it all a voice, in every color, as big as it will let me.
