Unbecoming - 30" x 40" Print

There comes a time when becoming is no longer the answer.

We spend years adding layers.

Expectations.
Roles.
Ambition.
Approval.
Ideas about who we should be and what a successful life should look like.

We become very good at constructing ourselves.

And then, somewhere along the way, a different question begins to emerge:

What would remain if I started taking some of it away?

Unbecoming was created through that question.

Layer by layer, the painting was built—and then disrupted. Paint was applied and partially removed. Surfaces were scratched. Colors were buried beneath other colors and unexpectedly revealed again. Metallic pigments appeared and disappeared. Gold was introduced, then deliberately distressed.

Instead of trying to perfect the woman who was emerging, I began allowing her to reveal herself.

And slowly I understood that the process of creating her was also her story.

She isn't becoming someone.

She is remembering who she was before the world told her who to become.

Her face remains partially unresolved because we are never completely resolved.

Parts of her disappear into the background. Others emerge unexpectedly into the light. Traces of what existed before remain visible beneath what came afterward.

Nothing has been completely erased.

Because perhaps growth isn't always about adding something new.

Sometimes growth is subtraction.

Removing what no longer belongs.

Questioning what we once accepted.

Releasing identities we've outgrown.

Scratching through the layers until something authentic begins to appear underneath.

And perhaps that is one of the strange gifts of getting older.

We become less interested in constructing the person the world expects to see...

and more curious about discovering the person who has been there all along.

Not becoming more.

Unbecoming what was never ours.

Until what remains is enough.