I love the idea of seeing through the clouds, or mist, or confusion, or veil of some kind.  That is a kind of superpower.  The power to see beyond the literal world.  It is something to aspire to and something that we have the ability to do in varying degrees depending on our mental state.  

 When we are not in a good mental state, it is really hard to see reality.  It is hard to know what to do if we are really struggling.  Hard to know where to start if we are overwhelmed.  It is important, in my opinion, not to get too comfortable in a mental state that is not healthy. It is also important to recognize that healthy is the baseline, and anything wavering from that is not good.

 I used to really struggle with depression and sometimes it comes back to haunt me, even now.  But for the most part I’ve moved on, and I now know that the depressed version of my self is not my real self.  So I let it pass.  Like watching a thick thunderstorm from the front porch. It passes.  The storm is not the baseline for normal everyday life, it’s just something that happens sometimes.  Someone once said half seriously “You don’t have to believe everything that you think”. That stuck with me as being very wise.

This painting is really about aspiring to see through the illusions of life.  The out of focus white and green and yellow is splitting for us so that we can see the clear and in-focus detail of the structure of life.  It has a biological feel because the essence of life are some of those shapes, like overlapping circles or spirals, hexagons, and other things reminiscent of a DNA double helix-the blueprint of life.