The Ballerina: The First Painting of a New Chapter

For a long time, painting was something I kept trying to get back to and couldn’t. I would start. I would stop. Life took the room, and then it took the time, and then it took the part of me that wanted to try.

When Kevin and I began building a life together, he gave me a space to paint. Not a corner. A room that was mine. I don’t think he knew what that would do to me. I’m not sure I knew either.

The Ballerina was the first painting I made in it. I started her in August 2023.

Where I was

To understand her, you have to understand where I was standing. I had spent years rebuilding. I had come out of relationships and circumstances that taught me anything good could be taken away without warning, and leaving those situations didn’t make that lesson leave with them. Safety is not something you decide to feel. It catches up to you slowly, if it comes at all.

By the time I was painting her, my life was beautiful. I mean that plainly. I was loved. I had a home and a person to dance with and a room to make things in. And I was standing in the middle of all of it waiting for it to disappear. I remember thinking that if I got too comfortable, it would go. That happiness this size couldn’t possibly be mine to keep.

That contradiction is the painting.

Her body

I didn’t want to explain any of this with a face. I wanted her body to carry it.

So she turns away. Her head falls back. There is surrender in her and there is disbelief in her at the same time, and I don’t think you can separate the two. She is letting herself feel everything and asking whether it can be real. She isn’t dancing from joy and she isn’t mourning. She lives in the space between, which is where I was living.

Why silver

People ask why she’s silver when so much of my work is gold. The answer is less poetic than you’d hope. Silver was what the painting needed. I paint with a technique I call Lumière Inversée, building the light before the shadow, and against the matte black foundation the silver gave me her form, her movement, her weight. She exists only where the light touches her. That is true of most of my women, and it is especially true of her.

Dancing

Kevin and I love to dance together. Somewhere in the middle of painting her, he competed in Life’s A Dance in 2024, and I went to every practice. He won. She was already on the easel before any of that, so I can’t say the competition inspired her. But those months folded into her. When I look at her now, I don’t only see a dancer. I see what it felt like to share something joyful with someone I love, in a season I was still learning to trust.

Two years, eighty hours

I finished her in 2025. Roughly eighty hours of work, spread across two years, though I didn’t keep count. She is 24 by 24 inches, acrylic on canvas.

The original is meant to be seen in person. Photographs flatten her. In a room, the silver moves as you move, and she shows you things from one angle that she hides from another. I built her to be walked around.

What I hope you see

If you have rebuilt a life, or lost one, or you are standing right now in a happiness that feels too good to trust, I hope you find something of yourself in her.

And if you know none of this and simply see a woman in motion, grace, freedom, a body made of light, then that’s yours. The meaning behind her belongs to me. The experience of standing in front of her belongs to whoever is looking.

Bringing her home

The Ballerina is available three ways:

• The Exclusive Edition: 15 hand-embellished canvases, 24 × 24, each one finished by my own hand and signed. $1,100.
• The Limited Edition: 50 signed and numbered prints on FineArt Baryta paper, 24 × 24. $395.
• The Open Edition: a 10 × 10 giclée on Hot Press Bright paper, unnumbered. $75.

Ten percent of every sale goes to FavorHouse of Northwest Florida and Gulf Coast Kid’s House.