On Transcen-dence
2025, Oil paint and oil pastels on wooden panel
A wooden frame holds this vision like a reliquary — a private altar where brokenness and holiness press against each other. Three figures occupy the scene, but it is the central body, painted blue and tender with wounds, that anchors the story. This body is weary from the weight of violence, its skin a ledger of pain and memory, its expression turned inward as though searching for a lost language of wholeness. To lose oneself in violence — toward body and soul — is to be unmoored, cast adrift in waters that seem intent on erasure. The body stiffens into armor, and the spirit, once fluid and open, contracts into something brittle.
Yet here, in the midst of this rupture, tenderness interrupts. One figure reaches to cradle the bruised head, fingers gentle but steady, as if reminding the wounded one that softness can still be trusted. Another, cloaked in rose-colored light, leans close with a face that is less human than spirit, less comforter than witness. Its presence radiates like a blessing, a reminder that there is sanctity even in suffering — that love, like the Holy Spirit, does not vanish when the body is broken. Instead, it gathers the fragments and makes of them a vessel for grace.
The golden rays painted at the top suggest revelation: that the act of choosing tenderness after cruelty is itself a divine act. To harden is easy; pain teaches us that lesson quickly. But to remain soft, to insist on loving oneself despite all evidence that the world has tried to strip you of worth — that is strength of another order. It is not weakness, nor naivety, but a fierce fidelity to the truth that your body and soul are not defined by violence, but by the love you allow to flow through them.
This piece reveals that love is not sentimental, not fragile. It is radical resistance. To cradle the wounded self is to say: I will not perpetuate the violence that has touched me. I will not let pain calcify into cruelty. I will not abandon myself to numbness. Instead, the self is carried — not by force, but by grace, by a current that moves like Spirit, lifting and bearing one toward who they were always meant to be.
The sanctity here lies not in erasing suffering, but in transforming it into a passage. The drips of paint at the frame’s edge suggest that the story spills out beyond its borders — that the altar is not confined to wood and canvas but lives wherever someone refuses to meet violence with hardness. Wherever someone dares to love themselves back into wholeness, there the Holy Spirit is present.
In this way, the painting is both wound and hymn. It is the bruise acknowledged and the tenderness that follows. It is a testament that the body, though battered, still glows with sanctity; the soul, though tested, still remembers softness; and love, though scarred, still chooses to bless.
-KB