The Whole of Me Original Painting

The Whole of Me 24 x 30 inches | Oil over Mixed Media on Canvas

Created on a premium 100% cotton deep edge canvas using high quality heavy-body acrylics, mixed media and Gamblin oil paints.

Meaning Behind the Piece:

This is not a painting about being complete. Completeness suggests a finished state, an arrival, or a version of yourself you can finally stop adjusting. This painting is about something completely different. It is about being real. The real you!

The Whole of Me was made from a place I do not always find easy to access, not the polished version of my inner world, but the actual one, the part that contains both radiance and shadow, fire and uncertainty, the days I felt everything and the days I felt too much to name. She holds all of it, the bold colour and the closed eyes and the history embedded in every stroke I stopped overthinking. She is not a finished woman. She is a true one, and that is an entirely different thing. The layers beneath the surface are not hidden. They are the point. Every mark that shows, every place where the paint remembers the process, is the painting telling you that nothing about her was edited out. She arrived whole, and she stayed that way.

This painting is for the woman who has spent years apologising for the full complexity of who she is, the one who has felt too much, wanted too much, carried too much, and has only recently, or perhaps only right now, started to understand that none of that was ever too much. It was always just the truth of her. She is the one who reads a room before she walks into it, who softens her edges for other people's comfort, who knows exactly how much of herself to offer before someone stops knowing what to do with her. This painting does not ask her to do any of that. It simply holds everything she is without question, without apology, and without end. 

The Infinite Mind collection, Limitless Women Universe.