WAR

Acrylic on canvas.

84x60x2"

This painting is the accumulation of a lifelong fight—not a moment of crisis, but the residue left after decades of internal combat. Every face, rupture, and distortion is the same consciousness at different breaking points, layered on top of one another because no version ever fully died. This is what happens when mental illness begins before memory, before language, before you know it has a name.

The violence here is not sudden. It is slow, repetitive, and intimate. Grief that was never allowed to surface. Fear that learned how to disguise itself as humor. Rage swallowed until it fermented. The grin is not irony—it is a survival reflex sharpened into a weapon. The body fractures not from impact, but from holding itself together for too long.

What makes this work unbearable is not despair, but endurance. The figure is nearly spent, visibly eroded, psychologically mutilated—yet still upright. Control is not clean or heroic here; it is taken back with bloodied hands. There is no surrender, only refusal. The war does not end. The mind simply stops letting it erase itself quietly.