Perspective

Medium: Acrylic, marble powder, fabric, wire, pebbles on canvas
Dimensions: 24 x 36 inches
Date: January 2017

Collector’s Notes

Composition
This work is a dialogue of dualities — light and shadow, hope and hardship, freedom and entrapment. The canvas is divided into two contrasting halves. On one side, the imagery blossoms with hearts, flowers, butterflies, and music notes — symbols of joy and resilience. On the other, a stark world emerges, where brick walls, spider webs, and stones represent struggle and confinement. At the center, three circles anchor the balance, symbolizing past, present, and future. In the brighter half, the present expands as the largest circle, affirming growth and life’s forward movement. In the darker half, the past looms larger, embodying how perspective shifts the weight of time.

Color & Light
The palette ranges from luminous and joyful tones — yellows, pinks, and verdant greens — to muted, shadowed hues that suggest heaviness and constraint. This deliberate contrast emphasizes the transformative effect of outlook: what dominates depends on where we choose to rest our gaze.

Medium & Texture
The surface is richly tactile, with marble powder, fabric, wire, and pebbles adding sculptural relief. These materials give form to both the heaviness of life’s burdens and the vibrancy of life’s gifts, reinforcing the painting’s thematic interplay between texture and meaning.

Style & Story
Rooted in personal poetry written during a difficult period, this painting transforms words of struggle into a visual meditation on resilience. By embodying the poems within color and form, the work transcends private memory and speaks universally to the human capacity for healing.

Emotional Connection
The viewer is invited to witness how perspective itself alters reality. In one reading, hardship eclipses joy; in another, joy radiates and redefines the weight of suffering. The circles remind us that balance is always possible, depending on which moment we choose to magnify.

Context & Significance
Created in 2017, this work stands as a testimony to survival, grace, and the reframing power of perspective. It bridges personal narrative with collective truth: while challenges are inevitable, how we perceive them shapes their impact on our lives.

Message from the Artist

Perspective was born from a time when I carried heavy shadows in my life — a season when the past seemed larger than the present and the future uncertain. By God’s grace, those times are behind me. Looking back, I realize it was perspective that saved me: choosing to see beyond hardship, to trust in balance, and to believe in renewal.

In this piece, I embedded my own poems into form and color. The happy half carries bright imagery — flowers, butterflies, hearts, and music — each one a symbol of joy and resilience. The circles represent time: past, present, and future. In the brighter half, the present takes its rightful place as the largest, showing how life expands when we live fully now. In the darker half, the past overwhelms, reminding me of how easily pain can dominate if given too much space.

This painting is a reminder to myself and to others: we cannot always control what life gives us, but we can choose how we see it. Perspective can shift everything.