Description
Red Hawk Flames is a meditation on the intensity of love—how it can burn bright, passionate, and all-consuming, yet leave behind something fractured when it fades. At the center of the piece is the eye of a hawk, sharp and watchful, holding a broken ring. This ring is not symbolic alone—it is a real, found object embedded into the work, representing a relationship in my life that came apart. Rather than hide that break, I chose to place it in the most focused point of the piece: the eye, where truth lives.
The surface of the artwork is alive with motion and color. I built it using marbles, beads, and small rounded objects—things I found in my environment—layered into a swirling, almost electric field. The repetition of circular forms echoes cycles: connection, intensity, fracture, and memory. There’s a sense of overload in the color and texture, inspired by descriptions of psychedelic experiences where perception expands and reality becomes saturated with meaning. Even without having lived that directly, I wanted to capture that heightened emotional state—the feeling of being overwhelmed by love, by loss, by sensation.
Thick, expressive paint moves across the surface, influenced by the tactile energy of Vincent van Gogh, where brushstrokes are not just visual but emotional. The flames are not literal—they are embedded in the movement, the reds, the tension between beauty and chaos. Created in 2008, the piece reflects a time in my life when I stopped dating my work directly, instead allowing found artifacts—like the broken ring—to serve as anchors of time and experience.
This work is both a record and a release: a moment where love burned brightly, broke apart, and transformed into something that could be held, seen, and understood.
