Two roads and an honest question…
Am I enough?
Will I collapse under the weight of this monument to nothingness,
as it grows taller every day,
or will I demolish the foundation,
crumbling pillars of desire and desperation,
that cling to the hope of a power I do not possess.
Collapse is inevitable.
But perhaps there’s something more to discover here,
as I’m becoming undone.
Artwork in The Undone Collection includes:
Unveiled (24x20) - Unseen (48x60) - Unsaid (48x60) - Unheard (48x60) - Unbroken (24x30) - A Safe Place (36x48) - Listen (30x40)
Each of the paintings you’re about to see were painted during the period between 2023 and 2025. I had left a marriage that wasn’t working, sold my home and moved into an apartment with two kids, an easel and a dream. I never could have anticipated all that would be revealed. Art was my diary, and these paintings carry the story.
Emerging Into Lightness (Unveiled)
24” by 20” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
Being truly seen feels terrifying. Eyes on me feeling like pressure. I stiffen, alert to what they might think, what they might say, And then I shrink because I feel safer in the shadows.
I’m thinking no one can see me here in my cocoon. Yes, I’m by myself, but at least it’s safe here.
But still, I feel this pull every day, like there’s something urging to be shared through me. I don’t understand it, this feeling of energy surging up in me like it needs to be let go.
I don’t even know what to do with it. Sometimes it feels like an ache. I want to rest, but rest is starting to feel like dying.
So, I take a deep breath and let it carry me forward, out of the shadows and into the light.
The Trio
Unseen
48” x 60” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
Every day feels like panic. “How am I going to make this work?” I sit in the same spot on my couch for hours, running the same thought over and over in my mind. “What if money runs out before sales pick up?”. I’m paralyzed with fear.
But I also feel this relentlessness, almost defiance. The only thing I’m more afraid of than money running out, is spending every day, all day sitting at a desk working for someone else’s vision instead of my own. So I pick up my paintbrush in search of hope.
Maybe I don’t need to be able to see everything. Maybe if I let go just a little, if I open my hand, God can grab it and lead me forward.
Unsaid
48” x 60” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
I’m not used to feeling heard or fully understood. I question if I’m too odd to fit in. Being in groups of people initiates this persona, smiling until my face hurts, eager to ease everyone’s comfort around me.
I feel tense pressure to walk this careful line of being open but not seen. “What if they see too much and decide they don’t like the true me? What will that mean about me?”
I am fully aware of the things that make me different. The words I choose, the raw open feelings that I fear will be too much, sometimes, the color of my skin, and often my belief that love is always the way, even when it hurts, even when love means letting go.
In a room full of people, my desire to share is met with heat in my throat and my heartbeat in my ears. But I take a deep breath and share anyway. So when I’m met with confused stares, tense debate or worse, complete dismissal, I decide that my perspective must not be worth sharing at all.
This can’t be where I stay because it won’t work for where I’m going.
Belief in me will have to be louder than the silence from others. I must remember that whether I chose to speak or not, there’s always gold in my voice.
Unheard
48” x 60” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
No longer do I feel free to let money flow, knowing exactly what my next paycheck will be, and when it would come. No longer do I feel the comfort of following a road that’s been traveled by many. And no longer do I get to lean on the advice of people who don’t really understand where I’m going, even though leaning there has long been my home.
It’s this sacrifice, that leaves me here, sitting in my apartment with only my own thoughts, my own nudges and my own intuition to guide me.
I come to yet another difficult decision. I feel heavy and torn, knowing the weight of every choice I make. I tune out all the opinions, some meant to save me from suffering and others from fear of being left behind, feeling less than in my presence if I soar too high.
I close my ears, go into the quietness of my own heart and take another step.
The Lumen Peel Technique
Every day in this apartment, every opportunity that comes my way, every rejection, every video I share, brings on a new trigger. Mostly showing up as paralyzing fear.
I feel myself exposed more and more. I’m being stripped down.
I can feel the push to rise to who I need to become, to do things I’ve never done before. And sometimes it feels like I might drown beneath the confusion of exactly what to do.
So I sit with the discomfort of being honest about who I am, how I see myself, how I believe I am seen. I feel the shame, I feel the weakness, I feel the uneasy question of “Am I wrong about my beliefs, my choices, all of this? What If I’m wrong about me? Do I accept myself as I am, or do I need to be fixed?”
I sit on my couch and battle thought and emotion until tension breaks and suddenly, light comes in and I’m aware of something real. It feels like recognition of who I am. Like layers peeling back to reveal the gold underneath. The truth of my value, the weight of my worth.
Unbroken
24” x 30” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
I see you. I see them tearing at your will, the attempts to break you down. I see you walk into the world every day weighted low by expectations. I see you loaded with the pressure to rise higher day after day in world that often doesn’t see the truth of your value.
But still it does not define you.
You are not broken.
You are moved.
Moved by the love of those you hold up. Moved by the faith of what you can create. Moved by the knowing that everything you do today will be built on for generations.
Lying beneath that armor is the truth of your resilience, your creativity, your tenacity. and your love.
I see it. I see you.
A Safe Place
36” x 48” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
I can rest with you.
I think you might see me. I think maybe, you want to know what’s behind my smile.
You look, you ask, you search and meet what you find without judgment or disgust. You seem to want to know as though discovering me delights your very soul.
You seem to see my passion, my openness, my drive, my grace, my hope and the greatness that lives inside of me.
or, perhaps, you are a mirror of what I’m finally seeing in myself.
Either way, this feels like a safe place to just…be.
Listen
30” x 40” Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
The voice isn’t loud or demanding. In fact, it’s more of a whisper, a tug. It’s a quiet call that I choose to follow.
Why?
It’s not logical, or clear, and it often doesn’t makes sense.
When I try to ignore that beacon it doesn’t get louder, I just feel farther from home.
I feel detached. It feels like a wound that doesn’t heal. It feels like a piece of my soul missing. A perpetual longing and distance from a kind of peace that I never felt but knew was there.
Until that day. The day I painted my life with oil and that feeling fell into place. I felt whole, found. After over a decade of searching it hit me suddenly, the warmth and fullness of alignment.
That peace, beyond circumstances, beyond logic, beyond fear, that fuels me forward. So every day I stop, I listen and I folllow.
This part of my journey was never about me becoming better, or fixing myself.
The challenge was always to tear away the parts of me I no longer needed, to uncover the gold that already existed.
Not to live from perfection, but from truth.
And to bring my vision into the world.
