Oil on canvas, 24”x36”

This painting is built from pieces. Photos of past drawings, fragments of earlier paintings, a strange doodled face I once made, and circles cut from old artwork. At the time, I was floating, emotionally untethered, grasping at art to ground me. I lived alone and painted constantly. In an effort to find something solid, I began creating collages from my older work, stitching together scraps of my artistic past into something entirely new. This painting emerged from one of those collages.

The cartoonish figure at the center is a distorted self-portrait — playful, strange, and fragmented. My sister’s face appears in the upper right corner, almost laughing at me and at the absurdity of life and the state I was in. During that chaotic time, she was my anchor, the quiet, steady presence who helped me feel less alone. Her image is both surreal and very real, a reminder of the love that helped me hold it together.

This piece is messy, funny, intimate, disjointed, and deeply personal. It’s not polished or pristine. It’s a visual diary entry, a record of a moment when I felt lost and was reaching backward and inward, trying to create my way into something more solid.