8' x 16"
Acrylic on Canvas
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Unbroken, Still Rooted & Rising 🔥
Deeply Rooted is a surreal reflection on resilience, transformation, and the quiet strength that emerges through adversity. At its center, two succulents…one luminous and pale, the other rich with deep crimson…grow together as though sharing the same foundation. Their forms are different, yet connected, each carrying its own history while continuing to reach toward the light.
Behind them, flowing marble is threaded with veins of gold, inspired by the idea that our fractures and difficult seasons don’t have to be erased to become beautiful. Like old cracks repaired with gold, they can become part of what shapes us rather than something to hide.
The crimson drips hint at emotional weight and the scars that life inevitably leaves behind, but the succulents themselves remain grounded, balanced, and alive. They aren’t reaching outward in struggle or resisting what’s around them. Instead, they embody a quieter kind of endurance…one rooted not in force, but in the natural instinct to heal, rebuild, and continue becoming.
True endurance is not always forceful or loud… sometimes it is simply rooted deeply enough to grow back.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether we truly choose what we do… or whether some things choose us. Over the last several years, I went through a series of experiences that left me exhausted, disconnected, and questioning nearly everything about myself. There was a period where I genuinely tried to walk away from art. I stopped painting. I worked as a carpenter in the mountains along Colorado’s Front Range and tried to convince myself I could leave this part of my life behind. But even when I wasn’t creating, I was still seeing in compositions. I still noticed the way light moved across buildings. I still imagined color relationships and rearranged the world in my mind.
I just couldn’t shut it off
Not because I was forcing it… but because it was rooted deeper than motivation.
At some point, I realized creating was never simply a pursuit or identity for me. It was nature. It’s how I process beauty, grief, chaos, memory, and meaning all at once. And when I tried to deny that part of myself, it didn’t bring peace … it created a deeper kind of emptiness.
That realization changed something in me.
I stopped viewing resilience as force. I stopped believing strength meant refusing to break. The truth is that I did break. I collapsed under the weight of certain experiences and lost parts of myself for a while. But eventually I understood that survival is not always an act of resistance. Sometimes it’s more of an instinct where the roots simply remain alive beneath the surface long enough to grow back.
That understanding became the foundation for Deeply Rooted.
The succulents in this piece are not fighting outwardly. They are structured, grounded, and alive. The drips suggest intensity and emotional weight, yet the form remains intact. To me, this painting reflects a quieter kind of endurance …one rooted not in force, but in the natural instinct to heal, rebuild, and continue becoming.
And maybe, in different ways, we are all deeply rooted in something we were meant to become.
