I am only showing the 3 finished piece of this series because the other two are unfinished, and I can't bring myself to re-enter the state of acute grief I was in when I originally worked on them.

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Two weeks before the covid lock-down started, my dad died. His cancer had become terminal while I was in the hospital for acute stress disorder, PTSD, and what I didn't know-then was the onset of Bipolar Disorder. We flew to be with him as he passed about a month after I got out of the hospital. I had just started one of my new medications that hadn't yet kicked in, and I was still experiencing pretty horrendous anxiety-filled mood swings as I stood by my father's bedside. My relationship with him growing up, and especially into adulthood, was complicated to say the least. Many of my interactions with him through out the course of my life also contributed to my severe anxiety (which feels strange writing about these days... with my beautiful medication cocktail and after thousands of hours of therapy, anxiety feels like a complete stranger).
 

After my dad passed, quarantine began. I wasn't able to fully process my grief until months later, when my medications kicked in an offered a safety need to experience my profound, complicated grief. On the worst nights, my husband would drive us to the ocean late at night, and I'd lay on the sand, looking at the moon and feeling as though that was the only place I could connect with both my dad and God. In the daytime I'd go to my studio, play Beatles songs and cry onto these canvases while I worked on the pieces.

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