Works in
Becoming.

A winged man has fallen to the ground. His left hand must bear his weight while the other reaches toward a gold rose hanging above him. The wings remain immense, but they have not prevented his collapse. The body that might once have appeared triumphant is shown at its most human: wounded, exhausted, reaching and uncertain of its right to ask for anything.

The rose bends down on a slender stem. Its petals are burnished gold, bright against a near-black field, yet the flower carries its own signs of decline. It is not a flawless emblem of reward descending from an untouched world. It has been weathered, too. The space between the reaching fingers and the bowing bloom recalls the near-contact in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, but the emotional direction has changed: one hand seeks upward from disgrace or regret; the other presence bends toward him without insisting that he first rise.

I think of the angel as a person confronted by the full history of his actions. Not all that we have done can be undone. Some deeds leave shame, remorse and a belief that we are unworthy of care. His downward gaze makes the reaching hand all the more affecting. He does not confidently claim innocence or forgiveness. He reaches while doubting whether either is possible.

Gold is my color of repair. In this painting it is not a verdict of absolution. The rose becomes the possibility that mercy may draw near even before the broken person believes himself deserving of it. The hand and flower do not meet. That withheld inch is the picture’s deepest tension: redemption sought, not assured; grace offered as a question that life must still answer.

Around Thanksgiving and the turn toward a new year, many of us take inventory. We think not only of what we have survived, but of those we have hurt, failed or lost, and of the versions of ourselves we wish we had been. This work leaves a place for remorse without closing the door on transformation. Renewal may begin in the simple and difficult act of reaching again.

A small, nearly obscured figure strains at the edge of a vast curtain of flowers. He is not standing in a garden and admiring abundance from a safe distance. He is pulling at the very fabric of the scene, trying to draw living color across a mountainous dark night. His effort has a private urgency: the darkness is immense; the person trying to cover it is almost swallowed by his task.

The floral wall is excessive on purpose. Crimson, coral, orange and vermilion flowers burn through the composition; white and cream poppy-like blooms open against deep green stems and shadowed foliage. The poppies are particularly important. Their fragile, papery forms have long been associated with remembrance and lives altered by loss, but I do not want them to become a fixed code. Here the pale petals also suggest the courage to remain soft after having been hurt. The red blooms hold memory and vitality together: the marks of a wound, and the refusal to let that wound become the only color in the world.

The dark landscape at the right is not conveniently erased. Night still occupies the picture, with distant mountains and a blackened horizon. The man is trying to alter the conditions of his own life by placing beauty before despair. It is both hopeful and tragic. A curtain can conceal; it cannot always cure. Yet the gesture contains determination. He could leave the darkness unchallenged. Instead he gathers every color he can find.

This is an image of the labor of healing. After profound loss, recovery is rarely one luminous revelation. It may be repeated acts of arranging flowers in a room that still holds grief, setting a table when someone is missing, opening a window, or inviting another person inside. Those actions cannot rewrite what happened, but they can make a life inhabitable again.

The holiday season heightens the painting’s central contradiction. Public spaces fill with light and color just as some private lives feel their darkest. I want a collector to find in this work permission to make beauty without pretending that sorrow has departed. What matters is the attempt to bring life back, even while the night remains visible beyond the curtain.