I started this one light.

People who follow my work know me for color. That’s not an accident color is how joy shows up, how hope shows up, how you get through a day. Most of the time that’s the truth of it.
This one started that way. Chaos, but the kind you can see through. Hands coming up out of the bottom, reaching. Figures pushing at each other. Loud, violent, still lit.

I’ve always loved the way light moves through stained glass. You don’t look at the glass. You look at what’s behind it.

Then I stood in front of it for a while and it didn’t feel true anymore. Because sometimes it gets dark. Sometimes the world stops feeling like light coming through and starts feeling black and you’re reaching, and you’re close, and your hand goes right past it.

So I painted the background out. Not because it was bad. Because that’s what happened to it.

Everything I buried is still under there. The hands, the reaching, all of it. Buried, not erased.

And look again at what’s left. It isn’t only a cross. It’s a woman head, shoulders, hips, her arms open all the way across. She isn’t on the cross. She is the cross. Made of a hundred separate pieces and still standing, still whole, still lit from somewhere behind the black.