I painted this Afro-Indigenous woman underwater because that’s where I’ve often found truth—in the quiet between inhale and exhale, between remembering and release. She’s neither drowning nor escaping. She’s claiming space in a realm that doesn’t ask her to shrink. In this moment, submerged in hues of cobalt and sunlight, she becomes elemental: not just of water, but of movement, history, and intention. The markings on her skin, the adornments circling her neck and breasts, are declarations—silent but sovereign.
What lives in this image is not just beauty, but balance. A woman suspended in the holy tension between worlds: land and sea, past and now, self and society. Her arms are outstretched not in surrender, but in expansion. In painting her, I wasn’t creating fantasy—I was revealing the unseen labor of becoming whole. This is what it looks like to breathe even when the world says hold it in. This is what it looks like to be free and unafraid of your own depth.
Breath Between Two Worlds is available for purchase. Collect it today!
Salt Sister Rising
She rose in silence,
to feel how light crowns the skin
after long nights of holding still—
the world still asks her to disappear,
but she chooses radiance instead.
Threads of coral wrap her thighs,
not as chains but ancestral script—
she moves like memory remembering
what it meant to be sacred
before the mirrors were broken.
The surface does not define her.
It bends and breaks above her brow,
yet she holds her breath like prayer
and dives again, not for answers,
but to remember her own questions.
There is no costume to her power,
no filter to blur her knowing.
She wears her voice in pigment and pulse,
in every tattoo of survival
that society still tries to scrub clean.
She is not a metaphor.
She is a body, a rhythm, a right.
Every woman watching her rise
learns a new way to breathe—
a salt sister awakening the tide.