There are places on this earth that feel like they exist between worlds. Caves are one of them; dark, ancient, humming with a silence that asks something of you. And deep inside some of those caves, in the places light never naturally reaches, something glows anyway.

That image never left me. The idea that even in the deepest dark, there is light. That it is small, and quiet, and it does not announce itself, but it is there. Despite any of us being able to see it or not.

Celestial Vigils is a painting about the people who leave us. Not a painting about loss exactly, but about what remains. The deep blue of this piece is the color of that grief, expansive, still, and somehow full. The black plaster edges rise like cave walls, like the boundary protecting a place we cannot yet enter. And the fiber optic lights glow from the rock like bio-luminescent glow worms, soft and persistent, like souls that found a new way to be present. I’ve always said, when people pass on they’re never really gone. They feel like they’re just in another room we can’t see.

I struggled with this one. I think that was the point. Some things cannot be made easily.

This piece is a vigil, a quiet act of keeping the light on for the ones who went somewhere ahead of us. A reminder that they are not gone so much as they are elsewhere. And that the dark they moved into is not empty. It glows.

Acrylic on wood cradled canvas
24” x 36”

Real orchids, celestite, quartz, Swarovski Crystal Rhinestones, freshwater pearl, resin, plaster, fiber optic lighting

$3,500

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.