Purpose is a 24 x 36 acrylic and mixed‑media work created as a ritual act of care. It began as an angel—painted for a friend who is mostly bed‑ridden, living with pain that makes even the smallest movements feel monumental. Each session at the canvas became a way of carrying some of her suffering for her, painting on her behalf what she could not move through alone. The early layers held wings, light, and the intention to help her remember that she still has purpose, even in stillness.
You returned to the canvas again and again, building the surface with sculptural relief, sands, composite materials, blacklight pigments, and alternating layers of hot and cold wax. Every pass was an act of devotion—an attempt to move pain through your own hands so she wouldn’t have to hold all of it herself. As the layers accumulated, the angel you began with started to shift. The figure changed shape, as if responding to something beyond your intention.
A crow emerged.
Its arrival echoed a moment in Scotland in October 2025, when a crow left a ring in your ceremony bowl and later its right foot at your family’s ancestral ruins. That encounter felt like a message—an offering, a witness, a sign—and the crow found its way into the painting naturally, as though it had been waiting for a place to land. The angel stepped back. The crow stepped forward. The painting revealed what it needed to become.
In natural light, Purpose reveals its layered strokes and sculptural textures—evidence of the many times you returned to the canvas to listen. Under blacklight, the crow’s eyes ignite in vivid concentric rings, exposing a hidden dimension that only appears in darkness. This dual reality is the essence of the Held From Above series: the seen and unseen, the physical and the spiritual, the surface and the message beneath it.
Sealed in multiple layers for depth and durability, Purpose is a work about transformation, devotion, and the quiet authority of knowing when something is complete. It honors the moment when a painting stops being an offering and becomes a visitation—when the image that arrives is not the one you intended, but the one that was needed. It is a testament to resilience, spiritual guidance, and the act of holding someone from above when they cannot stand on their own.
