When I painted this piece, I found myself stepping into a kind of inner desert. This one felt as real as the landscape outside my window, but is charged with the invisible forces that shape a life from underneath. The central figure with outstretched arms is, in many ways, my own symbolic self: the part of me that stands between the conscious world and the deep well of the unconscious, open to whatever rises. I didn’t plan that stance; it arrived on its own, the way archetypes often do.
The swirling energy that descends from the moon is my attempt to show how inspiration, or intuition, or visitation, enters the psyche. It’s a bridge between realms, a visual reminder that the boundary between the outer world and the inner one is more porous than we like to admit. Jung called this the meeting place of spirit and matter, and that feels exactly right.
The animals and figures that populate the ground came from that same intuitive place. The black cat, the crow, the fire spirit, the floating vessel: they appeared almost before I understood them. Only afterward did I recognize them as the familiar messengers that show up in dreams. They are guides, tricksters, protectors, and reminders that the unconscious speaks in symbols long before it speaks in words. Even the trees, bare and stark, feel like threshold markers, standing sentry between what is known and what is still becoming.
In this painting, the desert is not just a setting; it is a psychological landscape. It is alive, patterned, and sometimes fiery with meaning. It holds the tensions of opposites: life and barrenness, stillness and motion, solitude and communion. Creating this piece helped me see that the stories we carry inside us are always trying to surface. If we stand still long enough, and open enough, they will come forward on their own terms.