June 2026

Between Two Worlds

This one came slower than most. I sat with two colours for weeks before I understood why they wouldn’t sit still next to each other — orange pulling forward, blue pulling back, neither one winning.

That’s the moment I wanted to paint. Not before, not after — the exact second she stands between two versions of her life and stops needing to pick one to feel whole.

I think about how far back this goes. In caves like El Castillo in Spain, and Pech Merle and Gargas in France, among the earliest images humans ever made, hand stencils were left on the walls — and a Penn State study that measured their finger ratios found that three out of four belonged to women. Long before “artist” was a word, before it was a career reserved for men, it may well have been women marking the wall first, saying: I was here, I did this, I looked at something and made it mean something.

Then think about Artemis — a goddess who answered to no husband, who kept a forest for herself and let no one follow her into it. She wasn’t soft. She wasn’t decorative. She was whole entirely on her own terms, and the stories treated that as dangerous enough to punish. Actaeon just glimpsed her bathing and paid with his life. That’s how far back the fear goes — the fear of a woman who doesn’t need permission to be complete.

Somewhere between the cave wall and now, most of that got trained out of us. Women learned to make themselves smaller in rooms that weren’t built for them, to soften the edges, to let someone else’s vision take up all the space. Not because we forgot who we were. Because it was safer to look like we had.

Between Two Worlds is that history compressed into one canvas. Two colours, refusing to resolve into one. A woman standing in the middle of that tension — the world that was handed to her, and the one she is quietly, finally building for herself. Flat shapes, restrained palette, just her. No noise around the moment. When it finally clicked, it clicked all at once — the way these things usually do, once you’ve made the decision.

In the Studio

Between Two Worlds is available now — acrylic on canvas, 70 × 70 cm.