Mind/Body

Thoughts

This piece grew from somewhere unspoken, shapes and colours flowing from instinct more than intention. Often this is how I draw, just sketch a face and see what happens. But now that it's here, I see a conversation unfolding between body and mind, pain and composure, chaos and control.

At the centre, a face: calm, composed, almost serene (numb?). It looks out, meeting the viewer with quiet clarity, yet there’s a softness in the eyes that hints at something deeper, lined in blue. Around it, the world pulses as veins or thorns twist and weave, binding the figure to something raw and unfiltered. The heart, rendered with anatomical honesty but a cartoonish quality beats visibly below, bright, exposed and fake(?). There’s a split here, between the outer stillness and the inner storm. The heart feels everything, while the face must carry it in silence. The thorned tendrils, part vein and part barricade, seem to both connect and constrain. As if the body has grown its own protection—barbed, beautiful, and necessary. Pain has shaped this landscape. Not loudly, but insistently.

The background buzzes with a manic order—red, patterned, structured. Maybe it’s the world outside, trying to hold everything in a grid, while the inner self oozes out in golden drops and sticky dark matter. Trauma doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it seeps. And yet there’s no defeat here. Just an honest coexistence: pain and beauty, body and mind, held together by threads we can’t always name. This image, made without a plan, becomes a map. Not of where I am, or even where I’ve been—but of what it feels like to be stitched together from quiet storms.

Process

I do not have any process photos for this piece as it occured in one flow-state session and without plan.

I had been learning more about layering the posca markers and using them to create more patterns after creating post traumatic growth and playing with patterns in that piece.

Reflecting now, I'm not sure on some of my colour theory choices like the red arteries not standing out against the reds in the background. Perhaps I will return to this piece another time and recreate it.