BECOMING — Original Artwork

BECOMING

At first glance, the composition presents itself as an eye: large, colorful, restless, and intensely awake.

A dark pupil anchors the work while rings of orange, green, and blue radiate outward from it. Lines extend beyond the boundaries of the eye, almost vibrating into the space surrounding it, as though seeing were not a passive act, but something capable of creating movement beyond itself.

Yet another form is hidden within the eye.

Turn the composition, and the brown line crossing the iris begins to resemble a stem. The pointed green forms surrounding it reveal themselves as a leaf. What appeared to belong entirely to the anatomy of an eye becomes something organic and growing.

The pupil becomes a seed, a point of origin surrounded by color, movement, and life.

In this way, the eye gives birth to the leaf, and the leaf gives birth to the eye.

The two forms depend upon one another.

The eye represents perception: looking, experiencing, noticing, and taking the world into oneself.

The leaf represents what can grow from what has been seen.

Experience enters through the eye and reaches an interior place. There, it becomes something new: a memory, an emotion, an idea, a belief, a creation.

But the relationship also moves in the opposite direction.

Growth changes perception.

What takes root within us eventually changes the person who is doing the seeing. The leaf therefore does not simply emerge from the eye. It transforms the eye that contains it.

The work has no single fixed orientation. Horizontally, the eye dominates while the organic form remains partially concealed. Turn the work, and the leaf begins to emerge.

Nothing within the artwork has changed.

The viewer has.

Perhaps, then, this is neither simply an eye nor a leaf.

It is the space between seeing and becoming.

Because what we see gives birth to what grows within us, and what grows within us changes the way we see.

Artwork Details

Original artwork by Angelica De Jesus

Oil pastel on heavyweight, textured pastel paper.

Dimensions: 9 × 12 in. (22.9 × 30.5 cm)
Medium: Oil pastel
Surface: Strathmore 400 Series heavyweight pastel paper
Orientation: Multi-orientation artwork, designed to reveal different forms when viewed from different directions
Original: One of one
Signed: Yes

*This is the original physical artwork. It is not a reproduction or print.