I didn’t choose to begin this new series by forcing a painting of the failure of containment into form.
It wasn’t a decision.
It’s simply where I am.
Before there was a series, before there was language for what I was holding, there was this pressure—unnamed, unresolved, and deeply familiar. I didn’t sit down with an idea of what Release would look like. I just stood in front of the surface, already carrying it.
This painting comes from a place where restraint has stopped feeling like discipline and starts feeling like damage. Where silence is no longer quiet, but dense. Heavy. Inescapable. The kind of pressure that doesn’t ask permission anymore—it just waits until the body gives way.
I don’t paint a scream because I want intensity.
I paint it because something in me is already screaming—and it doesn’t care whether I have the words for it.
Release is not about expression as a choice. It’s about expression as reflex. The moment when the body takes over because the mind has held too much for too long. The jaw opens past comfort. The throat strains. Identity collapses into sensation. There is no performance left—only force leaving the body because there is nowhere else for it to go.
While painting it, I become acutely aware of how little control exists in moments like this. How release is not graceful. How it doesn’t wait until you are ready. It happens when containment fails—not because freedom has arrived, but because the system can no longer hold what it’s been asked to carry.
What unsettles me the most is realising that Release doesn’t resolve anything.
We’re taught that letting it out is healing. That if we finally express what’s inside, something will open, something will change. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes release is not relief—it’s evidence. Proof of how much pressure was required to reach that point.
That’s why this painting feels confrontational. There is no distance in it. No soft framing. No metaphor to hide behind. It is invasive because the experience is invasive. It forces the viewer into proximity the same way the moment forced itself into me.
Release is the piece I resonate with most right now because it occupies the exact point I am standing in—personally, and as I write Mary, the main character in my Whispers Through the Veil series, through the same fracture. It acknowledges that awareness can exist without freedom, that expression can erupt without escape, and that the first truth to surface is often rupture, not healing.
This painting marks the beginning of The Shape of Form Without Freedom because everything that follows comes from understanding this moment most clearly. The containment. The endurance. The denial. The aftermath. They are already implied here, inside this first break.
I didn’t start this series by asking how to be free.
I started it by admitting how much I was holding.
Release is not the end of pressure.
It is the moment we stop pretending it isn’t there.
And that is the only honest place to begin.