Artist’s Reflection: On a journey of circling around the depths of being—A tree in barren plains passed my eyes; growing wildly, beautiful and free.

There are moments in life when something passes through you—not violently, but irreversibly. Like a beam of light from a window shifting across the floor of a low-lit room, or the silence after someone says your name for the last time, neither knowing its importance. This painting began with one of those moments. I didn’t recognize it at first. We must live before anything else and reflect later. As I sat, the only feeling I could be certain of was something had cracked–not broken, just loosened up like a muscle sore after working out for the first time in years. A seam in the soul splitting open to light.

I remember standing in my studio, surrounded by immense music, thick enough to knock my breath out, and feeling my mind living on the tip of my brush. The painting began not as an act of creation, but of surrender. I wasn’t constructing an image—I was responding to something wordless and tender that rose in me, asking to be seen.

The form that emerged—what may be called a tree—wasn’t imagined. It arrived. As if it had always been there, waiting beneath the surface of my grief, my memory, my longings. Its roots twist upward like hands reaching in desperation or prayer. Its scarred body, hollowed, and yet unmistakably alive. I didn’t intend to make something pretty. But it became beautiful anyway—in how a person’s face becomes beyond beautiful after they’ve told the truth. The moment the crow’s feet visibly deepen, my favorite part about eyes.

The plains mentioned in the title barely show, but they haunted the entire process. Empty, unforgiving, quiet. I walked them alone in my mind—no map, no direction, only a gut feeling: it was an ending, and in its wake, a new kind of silence had begun. And in that silence, something wild took root.

The light in the painting—the gold, the flame, the sudden flare—isn’t there to inspire. It’s there to tell you that the fire didn’t consume everything. That even after, something still grows. Not despite the fire, but because of it. The cracks in the form are not damage. They are openings. Evidence of having lived.

I built the painting slowly, layer by layer. Often undoing the day’s work before only to put it back again.  Like memory itself—how it folds over onto itself, blending from its own re-imaginative living, how it resists being held all at once, only a singular 2d view of it at a time. The process mirrored my own: the circling, the returning, the questioning. I was trying to understand how something could hurt and heal at the same time. How absence could feel so full. How beauty could grow in soil no one had tended.

There was someone, once, who saw me without trying to possess what they saw. Not for long. Not clearly. But enough. Just enough. I won’t say more, not because it’s private, but because it doesn’t belong to me alone. Some stories live in the bones of things. You don’t speak of them. You carry them.

That encounter was the catalyst—not in a cinematic sense but in the quiet, interior way. The kind that rearranges your understanding of what it means to be seen. And perhaps more painfully: what it means to miss someone profound to our own being.

I kept returning to the same question as I painted: what does it mean to grow freely, beautifully, in a world that forces people to shrink to survive? The figure I painted doesn’t answer that. It is the question. It stretches, twists, and reaches with defiant grace. It rises not to impress, but to exist. To insist: I am still here. I am still growing.

The gold came last. I hesitated, fearing it would be too much. But that’s what grief teaches you—that nothing is ever too much when it is honest. Only lies are too much to bear. The gold isn’t there to soothe. It’s there to tell the truth: The most luminous fires are born in pitch-black nights.

No one asked what the title meant. “On a journey of circling around the depths of being—A tree in barren plains passed my eyes; growing wildly, beautiful and free.” It’s not a sentence—it’s a map. A memory. A confession. It’s the echo of a moment when I saw, or remembered, the part of myself I had abandoned. It had been so long since I wanted anything, I hadn’t even remembered how to want, more often feeling like a person stuck on a passenger train staring out the window. Like a mirror looking into a mirror. The part that didn’t need to be understood, only allowed to live.

As I walk by this painting hanging, proud is not a word worth attributing, but quiet, like an old Polaroid pic taken between the moments we felt life happened; a note of reprieve. I feel like I am standing at the edge of something sacred—not because it’s grand, but because it’s true. This painting is not a monument. It’s not even a farewell. It’s a breath caught in time. A single breath that says to any viewer: You made it through. You’re still making it through. And your life will go on… until it doesn’t.

And somewhere, in some imagined plain where the wind never stops moving, a tree you thought was gone is still growing. Wildly. Beautifully. And without apology.