“The Nest”

Oil on Canvas

50 × 40 inches

$3,800

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About the Painting:

“Nest” came from a place beneath language for me. It expresses the overarching idea of who we are in our soul before we learn to choose between authenticity and belonging, before we develop and edit our “personality” to stay safe or connected.

As I painted it, I was connecting to that early, instinctive essence — the natural self. This is a deeply personal painting, that carries the feeling of a real experience I had as a child, painting alone in the woods at eleven years old, where I claimed a small place in nature as my own, and felt entirely at home there. In that space I belonged - to myself, even before I had the language for what that meant, and to the world around me. Nature held me without question, and I experienced a sense of wholeness. Nest returns me to that moment, where creativity, presence, and belonging were not separate things, but one continuous experience of being alive.

I initially set out express this feeling in an entirely abstract painting, so I was entirely delighted when the ‘madonna and child’ imagery came through my early brushstrokes. The imagery, shapes and colors loosely describe my experience, but moreso they are designed to touch something within the viewer’s personal experience. To evoke the feelings of what is universal to the human experience. Sometimes referred to as a ‘signal moment’ we all have these moments in our lives where our personal story, our own private mythology, reveals the blueprint of who we came here to be. When we look at that origin point, it can becomes a set of instructions for living — a way forward that is uniquely ours.

Nest accesses and enlivens that encounter: with the soul’s true nature, and with the larger presence I experience as the divine. It is a process of awakening, of remembering, and of allowing that truth to light our individual path - again and again - toward a life of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.