The Darkness Call

2025—current

The Darkness Call is a painting series based on photographs of myself taken between the ages of 25-50. After turning 50 during a time of significant life shifts, I embarked on a return to the subject of direct self-portraits—that I started out with in my teens and early twenties. The act of making these reflective paintings now is an attempt to understand my history as a young to middle-aged woman throughout a quarter of a century. My work has long concentrated on blurred boundaries between subject and environment, an absence of empty space, and intense color saturation—specifically without any use of black. In this body of work I am responding to an intrinsic call to focus on sheer negative space and an emphasis on black. These quiet paintings are an act of entering a contemplative period.

Title TBD | Oil on Paper, Mounted on Panel | 12x9 Inches | 2025

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

—David Wagoner

How do you know that you are on your path – because it disappears. That’s how you know. How do you know that you are really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you are going. That’s how you know. And everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. And so you are going to enter the black contemplative splendours of self-doubt, at the same time as you are setting out on this radical new path.

―David Whyte