the hero's journey, and the gold that fills what breaks open

There are people who stay with you not because you hold onto them but because they simply do not leave. Moe, my one and only, is that for me. Always present, with a difference that now he is just on the other side of something I cannot see but keep trying to paint. With our anniversary just around the corner it feels like the right time to write about what his passing has meant for this work, and for me.

There is a Japanese art form called kintsugi, the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. The philosophy behind it is simple and radical. The breakage is part of the object's history, not something to hide. The repaired cracks become the most luminous part of the piece. When I first came across this I understood it immediately. Not as a concept. As a description of something I had already lived.

My dark night of the soul did not arrive as one thing. It arrived as several things at once. The world was in upheaval during Covid, that collective disorientation that most of us carried without knowing how to name it. And at the same time, quietly, at home, Moe was losing his memory. Watching someone you love disappear slowly while they are still present is its own particular kind of grief. And then three years ago he left this world entirely.

Joseph Campbell described the hero's journey as a descent into darkness followed by a return with something new. The dark night of the soul, which Hafez wrote about in his poetry and mystics across many traditions have described, is not a detour from the path. It is the path. The breaking is not the end of the story. It is where the gold enters.

What I did not expect was what happened in the studio during those years. I was making the Indigo Dreaming series and I was not satisfied. Something was missing. The work was not reaching where I needed it to go. Looking back I understand that the dissatisfaction was the practice, asking for more. Asking me to get more physical with the paint, more honest, more present. I started applying the strokes differently, more directly, more deliberately. And slowly, through that process of not knowing and staying anyway, Beyond the Veil began to emerge. The breaks made room for it.

The veils I paint are not only the mystical threshold between the human and the divine, the veil the Sufi mystics wrote about, the hijab between the visible and invisible worlds. They are also the veil between me and Moe. I still feel him. Not gone. Present in a different register, on the other side of something translucent rather than solid. That is what I am reaching for in the paintings. The place where the separation is real but not absolute. Where light still passes through.

Shattered Dawn came from that place. The light in it is not gentle. It is sharp and specific, the way early morning light is sharp before the day softens it. The way grief sometimes clarifies rather than dims. Nothing yet settled. Everything still possible.

The kintsugi cracks in my own life are where this body of work came from. I did not plan 

What has broken open in your life and let more light in than you expected?

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