Becoming Through the Layers

There is a painting in my studio that holds a secret storm.

It began with self-portraits I took in 2021, at the end of my marriage. Images I captured quietly, during a season of unraveling. They’ve waited, patient and unresolved, until I was ready to speak through them.

Now they live on canvas—partially visible, partially veiled—beneath gestures and words I never said out loud. The work is building itself in raw truths: rage, release, self-reclamation. It’s becoming a *palimpsest of my own healing, each layer a confession, each color a refusal to disappear.

There’s something unapologetic rising in it. The woman emerging here does not shrink. She does not beg to be seen. She decides who she is becoming.

When it’s ready, a poem from that time will find its way onto the surface—a ritual of remembering and a declaration of what will not be forgotten.

This one is not finished. But she is already becoming.

*Palimpsest originally refers to a manuscript page from which the text has been scraped off and overwritten—yet traces of the old writing remain. In art, it describes a surface layered with marks, text, or imagery that evoke memory, history, and transformation. It's a perfect metaphor for a painting like this: one where layers are built, buried, and revealed—each stage carrying the ghost of what came before.