When I started this piece I was hellbent on creating a painting with the Valkyrie symbol. I’d just formalized my consulting LLC under the name Valkyrie. In Norse mythology the warrior goddess symbol imbues a sense power and prestige, a decider of fate. I felt anything but powerful and prestigious at the time, and was tired of feeling fated for mediocrity. I was trying to paint my way to a feeling and I thought the Valkyrie was a good place to start. But I couldn’t get the composition right. I was forcing instead of flowing. One night, my then-neighbor and dear friend who made a habit of singing and playing her guitar on my back-alley patio, sang me the song “King of Sorrows,” by Sade (that’s her singing and playing on the reel). There are moments when the muses grace your heart with a heavy burden of inspiration and that was one of them. I took my friend’s songful gift to me and set it loose on the Valkyrie. What emerged on the canvas was a majestic sadness that didn’t ask for pity, just recognition. With both teardrop and crown, King of Sorrow reassures onlookers that there can be beauty and power in darkness.
NOTE: Painting sold, prints available.
#kingofsorrow #baltimoreart #arttherapy #valkyrie
Art is and always has been personal for me. Isn’t it for every artist? Appreciate @baltmag providing the opportunity for to me to share my version of personal.
Link to article in bio.
—Featured in Baltimore Magazine’s special “BE” mental health print issue and online.—
#mentalhealth #healingart #artheals #baltimoreartist #baltimoreart
Werks in progress for ‘Sunday Love x space between’ on May 31 (5-9 p.m.) at Flash D.C. Nothing like a deadline to finish pieces that’ve been sitting for months. Come see the finished products (and me) in two weeks. Ticket link in bio.
@sundaylovedc@space.between___collective_@flashclubdc
Layers 2-3 of 12; casting some spells on this one to give gratitude for a new “home away from home” art making space.
#abstractart #baltimoreartist #femaleartist #runemagic #runeart
No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong.
Layers 4-6, about 7 more to go.
#baltimoreartist #baltimoreart #abstractart #bliftd #artist
These are my pictures of Lebanon—Beirut graffiti, mountains backdropping the sacred Cedars, time with Palestinian refugees, Tripoli, the sea.
I was 19 when I went abroad, still had baby fat under my chin. It was 2003 and America was, again, at war in the Middle East. I went to see for myself the effects of my country’s violent imperialism. After 9/11, I believed none of the media. I wanted to understand the so-called “Axis of Evil” firsthand. America lied (duh), and I fell in love with what I found—Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria, and Lebanon, ma chérie al helwah.
In Beirut, I met Palestinian refugees my age who shared stories of Lebanon’s war with Israel. They pointed to buildings where mortar scars had been patched over, standing beside new romantic architecture built in hope of peace. Cranes framed the skyline, rebuilding what conflict tried to erase—earning Beirut its nickname, “Paris of the Middle East.”
One afternoon at lunch, a woman my age told me Lebanon was a country of women. Many men had left for work in Gulf States after the economy was devastated by Israel’s constant bullshit—attacks on refugee camps, blockades in the south, cycles of occupation. Men sent money home while women held shit down. They kept households running, raised children, worked, stood at protests—they carried the country through its most broken eras.
Maybe it was their anima—the feminine warrior. Or hearing the Palestinian struggle from refugees my age. Or the blue sea, the way it held the sun. Or the quiet streets after years of war, heavy with the possibility of peace.
Lebanon sticks with you.
Holding you in my heart, Children of the Cedars—and your neighbors. #prayersforlebanon
