When I was a teenager, I used to sneak out onto the roof of my house at 2am just to look at the stars. Not for any reason I could have explained then, just a pull. A deep, aching sense that something up there was trying to tell me something, and if I could be still enough, I might finally hear it.

That feeling never left me. I still drag my husband to the middle of the desert in the middle of the night just to stand under the sky. I still look up the same way, with that same longing, that same breathless sense that the universe is holding a message just out of reach.

Body of Starlight is where that feeling finally became a painting. And in making it, something I didn't expect happened, it became one of the most quietly healing things I have ever created. Childhood wounds I had carried for years found their way into the texture of it. Art has a way of doing that.

The central image, a waterfall rising and dissolving into galaxy, came from a question I couldn't stop asking: what if they are the same thing? And I couldn’t get the image out of my head. The preserved orchids bloom out of stardust as if they always belonged there. The fiber optic light scatters through crystals like a sky you can touch. And the deep purples and blues of the cosmos wrap around the luminous white center like the universe cradling something it loves.

This piece is the heart of Thresholds. The one the whole collection grew from. Stand in front of it long enough and you may feel it too, that 2am feeling. That quiet, electric certainty that the stars are not indifferent. That somewhere in all that light, there is a message with your name on it.

Body of Starlight belongs in a home where beauty is not decoration but devotion.

Acrylic on wood cradled canvas
24” x 36”

Real orchids, celestite, aquamarine, quartz, resin, plaster, fiber optic lighting

$4,000

This painting is available for purchase. You can currently purchase it at the Kayenta Center for the Arts. And it will be available to take home on June 31st. Each painting comes with a Certificate of Authenticity.