To paraphrase a metaphysical truism: “Once a seeker steps upon the path to enlightenment, they’re fucked.” You may think dedication to your higher consciousness is gonna be all light and lilacs, but it stinks like zombie breath. The path is strewn with the bones of lost opportunities, dismembered relationships, and the entrails of unresolved feelings.
You could try packing all that detritus into an autobiography-inspired, decoupaged box and kicking it under the bed. You could buy new clothes, change your name, move to another part of the world and give up sex and chocolate, but it won't make a difference. Once you've seen it on your path, you can’t disguise it or bury it deep enough in your subconscious. You're drawn to it like a zombie and you just gotta open that box and eat brains.
My painting, Shadow Work, is a moral tale about avoiding the inescapable work necessary to manifesting your beautiful, powerful, ever-loving self.
The Key to the Iconography
The Seeker: sitting at the intersection of dormant power (the snake) and unresolved history (the skulls), she wears the colors of royalty representing the potential of humans to become more than their physical manifestation.
Rainbow Serpent: Kundalini is the primal, evolutionary energy of consciousness. Rather than rising up the spine to open the Third Eye, the Kundalini remains looped around the arm, tethering the Seeker to her physical comfort. representing a potent spiritual energy that has been domesticated by the material world. It is the power of enlightenment used merely as an ornament for the self.
Velvet Sofa: the comforting material barrier between the skeletal remains of past griefs, shames, and fears and the Seeker's consciousness. She can only feel "at ease" by keeping these reminders of her fractured history beneath her, out of the direct line of sight of her singular, massive eye.
Skulls under the sofa: zombies of the subconscious, that which we hide from ourselves consciously or unconsciously, about our behaviors, or uncomfortable decisions.
Subconscious Storm: the pressure of forces demanding to be integrated.
The Owl: symbolic of wisdom, gestures for silence and observation, suggesting that the only way to survive the storm is to allow the Kundalini to uncoil and face fears directly.
The Window: a portal to the illusion of an integrated self.