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Field Notes from the Cultural Apothecary

Angie's Dream

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Angie's Dream

This painting began with a simple commission: a woman and her small companion.

From there, it slowly found its own path.

In the finished image, a woman stands beneath chestnut trees with a small black dog beside her.

We never see her face.

Instead, we stand behind her, looking across a quiet road toward a house nestled among trees.

The house feels strangely familiar.

Perhaps it is a home.

Perhaps it is a memory.

Perhaps it is something not yet lived.

Between her and the house lies only a road.

A few steps.

Yet she remains still.

Somewhere along the way, the road became the painting's quiet centre.

Not a barrier.

A threshold.

A place where possibility gathers.

A moment before movement.

A dream before it is lived.

Angie's Dream.

Nothing moves.

Everything begins.

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The Transformation

The Transformation

Some paintings do not begin with an idea, but with a vision.

The Transformation came to me in that way: not as a concept, but as an inner image unfolding slowly, asking to be translated into color, form, and gesture.

At the base of the painting are patterns inspired by Indigenous visual traditions of the Amazon. They appeared to me not as ornament, but as a kind of living ground - a woven language of memory, spirit, and relation. From within that language, the python emerged as a sacred presence, overseeing the transformation held within the canoe, where a flowering tree rises like a sign of life becoming something other than itself.

The jaguar, meanwhile gazes forward - toward the place where the river disappears into the forest, into what cannot yet be seen. It carries the force of threshold and prophecy, of instinct turned toward the future, while the canoe becomes a vessel of passage, bearing this quiet metamorphosis between worlds.

These elements entered the work almost as presences rather than symbols, creating a landscape shaped by passage, watchfulness, and change.

For me, The Transformation dwells in that sacred in-between space where something old loosens, where unseen forces gather, and where the soul begins to move toward another form of knowing.

When Winter Breathed a Smile

When Winter Breathed a Smile

A festive table in the snow, a red visitor from another world - the bear smiling in wonder.

In the stillness of winter, something arrives that does not belong, and yet feels strangely destined. Color steps into white. Warmth sits across from fur and frost. No words are needed. The moment itself becomes a quiet celebration - of chance, of presence, of a joy that finds its way even into the coldest places.