Original oil painting on abs board. 49” feet w x 37” h (unframed).

Painted by Skye with love xxoo.

I endured three life-changing surgeries to help me walk again and heal chronic pain from a total hamstring avulsion and genetic hip dysplasia. When I was almost finished painting Phoenix Rising my house burned down from an electrical fire during the first lockdown of corona virus. The fire started at my neighbor’s home. It seems more than coincidental that my physical life would so profoundly change as I literally built anew out of the ashes. The phoenix rising story from ancient Greece was about the new life of a mythical, long-lived bird that is reborn again and again from the ashes of her previous life to transcend and transmute her previous identity. Phoenix Rising is another painting where I focused on the beauty of rope ties and their artistic interplay with the beauty of the human body. Here my human figure bound in ropes symbolizes the power of the goddess to surrender, then rise to new levels of wisdom and self-awareness.

In current times, the concept of a female goddess representing wisdom is shadowed by the masculine forms of divine intelligence represented by male gods. I believe the idea of divine feminine wisdom needs to be brought back as a relatable icon of feminine power. I would not have been able to emotionally transcend my physical pain and personal losses if I had not developed a personal philosophy to overcome them. The healing art of movement and natural states of altered reality have given me a pathway to universal knowledge in the form of cosmic consciousness. The only way I can manage the pain and loss has been by diving into the suffering, feeling it through my whole body and then transcending the pain through my artwork, movement, and altered states of consciousness.

Phoenix Rising is also about radiant inner passion expressed as pure love. The goddess in mythology often represents beauty and radiance. Radiance is heat or light reflected or emitted by something and is much deeper than beauty on the outside. For instance, I radiate when I take care of my body, authentically express myself, and offer my feminine energy as an expression of love to my creative partner, my photographer. I believe true radiance and beauty emanate from the soul when we give and receive love. Who I love and how I love is an empowered transformational choice. In this painting, I painted the background dark to dramatize the lighting coming up from under my torso. This bright lighting is symbolic of the passion I feel and symbolizes the love I have for humanity, animals, the planet, and my rope partner. My expression is calm, and I am in a peaceful altered state of awareness. Like the phoenix rising, I have transcended each challenging experience by creating, honoring, and then expressing a more authentic version of myself. xoxo