Skin black as the darkest depths of space, almost purple in places depending on the angle of viewing, glistening with stardust. The appearance of a solid, muscled form beneath the skin shifts in the blink of an eye to gaseous whispers and back before your mind can make sense of what you’re seeing. Humanoid, animal-like, giant and smaller than you can ever imagine all at once.

There is little your mind and eyes can hold on to. It’s eyes, blacker than obsidian with the pinprick lights of galaxies in their centers, find you and you are changed forever. Pushed beyond it’s capacity, your mind slowly loosens it’s grip on what you thought you knew, slowly reforming, processing and adapting to accommodate vast new realities, forever changing who you thought you were.

••••••

It’s funny, when I made this painting eleven years ago, the title was there almost immediately after I’d laid down the last brush stroke. I’m not sure about what it was, but It instantly felt like part of a mythic story passed down from a time so long ago that we couldn’t begin to imagine what living then might have been like. The “angel” felt like it was emerging from silvery mists and reforming itself into something quasi comprehensible to a human mind, but it wasn’t quite there, yet.

The two paragraphs at the beginning of this post literally just came to me as I was typing. Every now and again, I get a clarity about certain things that may have been on my mind for a while. Things that have bobbing around in my mind for possibly years before connections begin shaping and bridging gaps between ideas and lived experiences. I was thinking about this painting more after posting it elsewhere earlier this morning and when I sat to write about it, something about this work began taking on a sharpness I’ve not had about them previously.

There’s something about this painting that resonates as mythic or fantastical. Like a wild, unheard of being coming forth from tales told long ago. “Black Boned Angel”; does it really have black bones? Is it a god, demon or other extra-dimensional or extra-terrestrial being? How different is it from human beings? Does it have supernatural powers?

Part of what brought me here is the result of having just watched the first half of season two of “The Sandman” on Netflix and revisiting some favorite comic book series. All of it had me thinking about the connections between personal and collective trauma with the mental and emotional adjustments and recalibration we’re having to make in this particularly unsettling moment in the U.S. globally. I think back to my childhood and the ways in which I dealt with trauma, which mostly consisted of desperately trying to cope by focusing on whatever fantastical situations or stories I could come up with in the moment to try and ease whatever psychological discomfort I was experiencing.

The most important thing to remember is that we can’t go back. There’s no returning to what was thought of as “normal” prior to January, 2025. So much is being irreparably broken and destroyed that there’s no way forward without reimagining and rethinking almost everything about our federal government and socially. The times we’re living through in the U.S. and globally, with all of the troubles and grief being visited upon people caught up in the madness and hate of megalomaniacal men hellbent on making life as hard as possible for anyone not deemed “worthy” is causing collective trauma and this is time ripe for new myths and storytelling about this time to begin emerging. Maybe not right away, of course, but give it a little time. We’ll get around to a point where there’s enough time behind us to figure out how to process what’s happening. There won’t be a need for extra-human characters because a lot of us will have to have been our own “superheroes”. There’s nothing left to do but save ourselves as best we can.