A new chapter begins.

There's nothing like a move to show you what you've been carrying. Every box is a question. Do I need this? Is it adding or extracting? I found a drawing I'd judged harshly. Looked at it again and thought, wow, that's actually pretty great.

The middle is uncomfortable. Last week I wrote about our home being in repair and the garden requiring more than I have to give. My mattress is on the floor and clothes are in bins. Picking what to wear has become a small daily exercise in surrender. But the studio is ready. The light is good and the work is waiting.

I'm building a place for magic-making. Glad you're here.

Ann

The first time I saw her, I was inside looking out the window. The next time, she called to me from the sidewalk while I was on my hands and knees transplanting hostas.

“Hey.”

I turned around. When our eyes met she said, “I used to be a gardener. I used to do a lot of what you’re doing. I regret it now. You might regret it someday too.”

I thought about her for weeks. The comment pissed me off. It was abrupt and felt awfully familiar, like a judgement only a best friend could make. But she hadn’t said anything I hadn’t already thought. I’ve always wondered if I’m biting off more than I can chew. Will I want to weed this twenty years from now?

The past few weeks have been a rough kind of overwhelming. There’s been the studio move coupled with water damage in the house where the floors buckled. Wood flooring is being replaced and every piece of furniture carried out to make room for crews and machinery, the house gutted down to its bones. Both things at once, and the garden demanding more than I had left to give.

This morning I broke down crying. All three incomplete with all three at full bore. At 7 am I was watering plants in the driveway when I heard it.

“Excuse me.”

I turned around. She didn’t say anything at first. She was just staring at what was behind me: four massive metal racks, each seven feet tall by four feet wide, over 300 dahlias, every one of them having outgrown their pots.

I said, “You know, this is some kind of mental illness.”

“That’s right,” she said.

She stood on the sidewalk. I stood at the top of the driveway and looked at the lawn between us. Something crossed it that neither of us named, so I walked down to meet her.

She said, “I used to do exactly what you’re doing. Every time I walk by your house I think of all the hard work, the many hours. And now I don’t care about it. My husband died, and then my son died a year and a half later. And at that point I just quit.”

I told her that maybe this summer, when she walks by and sees me outside, she should stop me. I’ll clip a bouquet for her. “Maybe it would be nice,” I said, “for you to not have to do any of the work, but to reap the rewards this year.”

She nodded and said OK.

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On my way to pick up the keys to my new studio. Been a long time coming.

The hyacinth I planted last fall recently filled my home and studio with their intoxicating sweetness. Daffodils by the hundreds stood golden in jars throughout both spaces. This was my first year growing Narcissus flowers. I planted the bulbs last Fall with the intention of painting them into my Becoming Eros series.

Tubers and seeds that I started playing with nearly two months ago now sit at over 300 plants ready to go into the ground.

As I look down at the dirt that won’t scrub out under my fingernails from all the moving of dirt this last week, I feel something I can only describe as profound joy. I won’t say happiness because it’s something deeper. Satisfaction. Wonder. Alchemy. It’s the kind of feeling that makes you want to cry and laugh simultaneously.

I didn’t do anything extraordinary. I planted bulbs last October. I planted seeds in March. I watered things and showed up.

1. Dahlia seed emerging

2. Filling small cells, about to move into 4” pots

3. Moved and settling in to 4” pots

4. Small tubers waking up in 4” pots

On the same day I planted the now thriving dahlia seeds, I also planted 36 cells of fern. I wanted these to take. They’re the same breed I grew up with.

I followed the fern directions to a T: temperature, humidity, light, everything precisely as specified. Not only had I read the directions, I’d done additional research. None of it took. Only sprouts of mold.

The dahlias? I’d read the directions before planting. These were expensive, specialty seeds with cumbersome, complicated instructions. But I already had my supplies: small trays filled with small cells that I’d used with success in years past. The directions warned against this method. As I planted, I remember thinking, “Why can’t I just follow the directions?” I was frustrated with myself. But then something shifted: “I do have some experience here. Can I trust that I’m doing what works best for me?”

1. Coffee and pajamas on a Sunday afternoon is a rarity.

2. New peony shrub (Planted last summer) producing it’s first blooms.

3. Half of these tubers have not sprouted yet. Some of them are duds but I’m giving them a final push before I take what’s sprouted and put in ground later this week.

4. Pinching tops of what started as seed March 20.

I didn’t work in the garden yesterday. I rested in it. I enjoyed it. I, a Mother myself, sat with Mother Nature on Mother’s Day and felt solidarity. I felt Mothered and Mothering.

Our world is obsessed with transformation. I often share dramatic transformations through photography and video on social media: seed to wall, ground to gallery. But dramatic before-and-afters, along with seemingly overnight success, signal revolutionary change and that can be misleading.

As a creative, so much of my work exists in the realm of the invisible. Ideas are under constant development, skills are slowly sharpening, and there are hundreds of failed attempts no one sees.

This year’s seeds served me the physical proof that unseen work matters. It’s validation for every invisible hour of practice, every quiet morning of showing up when nothing looks different yet. And those moldy fern cells? They’re proof too. Failure is part of the process. Following directions doesn’t guarantee success and sometimes you have to experiment and trust what you know.

Not every day feels meaningful. Some days it’s just pushing seeds into soil or remembering to water. Some days you follow directions perfectly and get mold instead of ferns. But somewhere down the line, maybe when you’re not even watching for it, your whole house fills with the fragrance of what you planted in faith and what you planted in defiance of the rules that didn’t serve you.

Home grown peonies pulling their weight in my work.

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Integration

42.5 x 56 inches

Lead on Photographic Print / Archival Pigment Inks on Epson Somerset Velvet (255 gsm) 100% Cotton Rag Fine Art Paper

2026 (video playing at 1.5 speed)

A few years ago, I spent time in Rome photographing walls along side streets, anywhere I could get lost, particularly around the Corso. I’ve always been fascinated by Rome’s history and its symbolic use of color. I wanted the weight of many coats of paint over centuries as the foundation of this piece.

Rome holds a special place in my heart. I found myself there as a woman in my late teens. It represents a good kind of home, something I’ve carried with me and that has carried me.

Years before this drawing, I returned to the Pennsylvania woods where I spent my childhood. I lay in the same ferns that cradled me then. I was on the cusp of understanding something I’d been searching for my entire life: that the mirror, the witness, the recognition I needed… it would never exist outside myself. I had to become that.

The flamingo has appeared in my work for years. As archetype and self-portrait.

Fifteen months ago, the vision for this drawing came. I didn’t know it would be the last piece I’d finish in this studio.

I drew myself lying in those childhood ferns, surrounded by flowers from my current garden. My face here is a much younger version of myself from memory, one holding the wonder of what’s to come. My eyes are closed and I imagine, in spirit, surrendered. I’m cradling an enormous flamingo, a fiercer side of me, whose neck wraps behind me and emerges on the other side.

The flamingo's eyes are sharp, fierce but knowing. She’s spent a lifetime ready to fight. But here, she’s letting herself be held. Both sides of me, finally met. Both surrendered to integration.

Past (Pennsylvania ferns), formation (Roman walls), present (garden flowers), all held together. Drawn on the foundation of the place that held my becoming.

The timing: I started this near the beginning of a transformation and am finishing it at the end of the chrysalis.

The figure and the flamingo have always been the same being. I move to the new space this month.

This piece is available here.

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I wrote this a few days after I filled my mother’s crystal vase with fresh flowers for the first time. May 2022. I’ve kept it private since then. You’re reading it before it goes into the book.

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On my drive in to the studio today, I was thinking about how I’ve been trying to do things differently in my writing. It’s kind of like when you’re painting and something happens that is unplanned, but the artist recognizes it as essential to the work itself. When I’m creating and in a flow state, I really don’t know what’s going to come, and the mastery comes in knowing what to keep and what to kill. That is what I’m learning to discern as I grow as a writer. I ask myself questions like: What am I giving here? Am I giving? Why am I giving? Who am I giving for?

And recently, I’ve started asking myself, what do I want? What do I need?

I recently wrote about the performance of a lifetime. The transformation is sobering and at times dark and messy, just like a chrysalis. Sometimes change just sucks. But getting quiet inspires a lot of curiosity about one’s own behavior, nevermind the clarity one receives about others.

I’ve been very tired lately, in part from grief, but I imagine much has to do with what I’m making in the garden and studio.

I’ve caught myself numerous times questioning my sanity with what my hands insist on growing. I recognize it as obsession, but it is all I have ever known.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve spent an entire lifetime creating beauty in an effort to make up for what I was taught to perceive as my own lack of beauty.

When I started writing on Substack, I think it was in an effort to do the same thing just in a different medium. I even named my space here on Substack Growing Beauty. Ironic. Another place to prove worth by offering beauty… growing it in the garden, creating it in art, giving it away.

Earlier this week I wrote: “I am the Art and in turn the beauty itself.”

It didn’t sit right when I wrote it, but I also didn’t want to over-analyze or dwell. I now want to revise what I wrote.

The word beauty itself still positions me as object for viewing. It requires someone outside myself to confirm I am beautiful. Even when I claim it, I’m still in dialogue with the gaze that judges.

I don’t think I need to define what I actually am. I’m beginning to see, living in Track 2, that offering explanation is not necessary. These things don’t require confirmation. They exist whether witnessed or not.

Power. Eros. Whatever it is, it is.

Permission to be.

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I spent the day in the studio yesterday with flowers from the garden, pushing myself through deep psychological inquiry. As I wrapped up, I was struck by the abundance and beauty of what surrounded me. I decided to photograph myself in the space.

As a portrait artist for decades, I was trained to direct: tilt here, soften there, smile now, laugh. Yesterday, as the shutter clicked, I caught myself doing the same thing. Performing joy. I was following my own coaching and smiling on cue.

I stopped, anchored myself, and asked: What would it look like to just be in this space and not perform being in it?

I relaxed, let the smile go and clicked the shutter.

This morning, I looked at the images. Here I am in this gorgeous space, surrounded by vibrant work, and I’m not smiling.

And yet the beauty is there. I am the Art and in turn the beauty itself.

What I just wrote goes against everything I've ever been taught to say about myself. But I recognize the statement as true.

The book explores this as two tracks.

Track 1: Performing the feeling for the viewer. Smiling so they know you’re happy. Managing their reception.

Track 2: Being the thing itself. Present. Not explained.

I spent decades in Track 1 and am learning Track 2 now.

The photographs show the difference.

I shot this naked, behind my tulips, thinking about the velociraptor in Jurassic Park. The one who waited and knew exactly what she was doing.

Six years ago I created a piece of an egret hiding in botanical bliss. I was asking: could I be beautiful too?

This time I didn’t need the egret. I was the animal.

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My entire body ached. Moving felt like sinking in quicksand. I made a reel for Instagram while I planted. I kept my head down so the misery wouldn’t show. The only part I enjoyed was tucking the bulbs into the dirt. I wanted to be tucked in. I’d just hit rock-bottom, so I chose the garden over people.

I set parameters: outside of work, don’t talk to anyone except family. Maybe a friend or two. I asked myself how I’d get away with it. I answered that I didn’t care. I called it The Performance of a Lifetime and began, without warning, on November 21.

I decluttered. The more I threw away, the more the book spilled out. I focused on the Becoming Eros series with the black hare leading the way.

Spring

I didn’t know the narcissus had bloomed overnight. I’d checked on them only days earlier. There was growth, but nothing like what I saw when I opened the patio door. Hundreds of them stood there, bright and alert. At attention. Bright center trumpet blowing. You’re not fooling me.

As I pull each one from the bulb, I hear a snap. It’s palpable. I bring the flower up and turn it to the side to look at the roots. They look raw and severed. Irreversible.

I didn’t use a shovel. The act was violent. I felt it in my gut.

I filled one vase after another with narcissus. These blooms are meant to come back year after year. Not here.

The dirt is cold and damp. I bite my fingernails so low there’s nowhere for the dirt to go, but it beds itself into my cuticles. As I dig, I see worms. I don’t want to hurt them. It crosses my mind that it’s inevitable. Better hand than a sharp shovel.

After I finish pulling the narcissus, I pull hyacinth as well. The hyacinth fills my home and studio with a sweet fragrance. The narcissus offers none.

I load the flowers into the car and buckle them in. I think of my grandfather who would say, precious cargo is here. The kindest thing he ever said to me. The worst thing he ever said to me was I won’t die happy until I see you in a bikini on the beach.

On the way to the studio, I play one song on repeat. Within minutes, I think of a piece I started over a year ago. It’s in my flat file. I put it away because I hated it. The face of the young girl in it. She was me. I had drawn her over a photograph I took in New York.

As soon as I get to the studio, I pull the drawing out. I push everything off the drafting table. It falls to the floor. A stack of large sketchbooks I lift and set aside.

I turn on the speakers and the lights. I move a softbox over the table. I grab the oil sticks, hesitate, then draw over the image. When the oil stick isn’t enough, I reach for titanium white and cover it with a brush. I grab a few narcissus flowers. I take the ones with the loudest trumpets. I draw the first. Then the second. Then a third smaller one into the mirror already penciled into the piece. Two larger forms. In the reflection, a disheveled figure.

My hands move faster than my mind can catch up. The earlier morning writing comes back to me. It was beautiful, controlled and polished. This drawing is not. It comes from the same ground as the bulbs. The piece that called to me is now answering.

I think about calling someone. I stop. This moment is for me.

I hear my psychiatrist from a month ago: Ah, now I’m meeting the woman your parents gave birth to. We sat in silence.

Pink Book

30 × 40 in

Graphite and oil paint on photographic print, 100% cotton rag

It’s moving. Some days that means forward and some days just through.

Mirror Woman, Becoming Eros is doing what I think all honest writing eventually does. It’s turning back on me. I set out to write about becoming and inhabiting one’s own authority. I’m giving language to the long and often brutal process of finding yourself after years of looking for yourself in other people. What I didn’t anticipate was how much the writing would insist that I keep looking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about authority and what it means to write from it. I remind myself that I’ve earned these words and this story. And still… there’s something that happens when you move through your own past with intention. It’s one thing to remember, but to examine… you see with startling clarity, the architecture of the choices you made and the patterns underneath them.

For me, a lot of those patterns trace back to one place: I was raised to believe I was not worthy of my own authority. I imagine a lot of us were.

The work begins here.

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There isn’t a day in my garden or in the studio where something doesn’t reveal itself.

This morning, I noticed the dahlias had pushed through the soil overnight. These aren’t ornamental dahlias grown for someone else’s arrangement. I grow them from seed, the same seeds that will become the work. From the moment they break ground to the moment an artwork is finished, my hands have been on all of it.

All are less than an inch tall, from seed planted only days ago. The seed is still attached to the top of the first leaves, it hasn’t fallen away yet. And still the plant is already moving, orienting toward light and doing what it came here to do. It doesn’t wait to be free. It pushes through and grows with its origin still fastened to it.

I‘m in awe and this feeling is not new.

What struck me first was the movement, that it doesn’t wait for clean separation to begin. Those first leaves aren’t the true leaves. They’re a temporary architecture built entirely to get the plant started and to bridge the distance between seed and something that can sustain itself. They’ll be replaced and the plant already knows this. It builds them anyway, fully, because there is no skipping this part.

I can’t stop turning this over: the casing it’s still wearing isn’t just what it came from. For now, it’s still what it’s eating. The seed holds the last of the stored energy. This is the food the plant draws on until its true leaves can do the work themselves. It’s still being fed by the thing it is in the process of leaving.

I think about this in relation to the work. I think about this in relation to so many things. Heartbreak is the cost of not abandoning yourself.

Every waking hour right now is given to something unfinished, something not yet fully formed. There are moments when this feels like a problem to solve, when I want the clean start, the resolved thing, the moment after. But the dahlias don’t have that luxury and they don’t seem to need it. They come up in the night, carrying what they came from, turning toward something they can’t yet fully use and building structures they will eventually shed.

They’re moving. All of them, at once, each one still attached to its own origin. So is the work. So am I.

What I’m slowly learning, and often from the garden first, is that the unresolved thing is not the obstacle. The carrying of it might be exactly what makes the next thing possible. You don’t outgrow the origin by leaving it behind. Sometimes you outgrow it by drawing from it until there’s nothing left to draw, and only then does it fall away.

I didn’t watch the seed break ground. They came up in the night, while I was somewhere else entirely. The movement was real and continuous. It always is, but invisible to me until a threshold was crossed and suddenly: there they were. Less than an inch tall and already in the middle of becoming.

I find this steadying. The work moves even when I can’t see it moving. It doesn’t wait for me to be ready and neither do the dahlias.

This is where the seed becomes the work.

Explore the work →

Before I understood composition or learned to speak in apertures and exposures, I drew. It came naturally the way things come to children before anyone tells them what they’re supposed to be doing, freely and without asking permission. Mark making allowed me to survive and that quality of making, the unselfconscious kind, is the one thing I’ve never lost. It’s what’s kept me going all these years.

Becoming Eros began nearly a year ago. I just wasn’t calling it that yet. It became a body of work with a specific energy I was choosing to move toward, both in and out of the studio. Eros extends beyond desire. It is life force, the movement toward and the impulse that creates.

Something in me had stopped negotiating. I recognized, perhaps for the first time with full clarity, that I was the alchemy, that eros had been in the work all along. When I stopped dispersing that and began holding it for myself, everything changed. It is a field I occupy fully. Once I caught up, I knew the space needed to fully embody that spirit.

I’ve always thought of space as a container for energy. The rooms we inhabit either support what we’re reaching toward or quietly resist it. As the work developed, I became aware that the center of the studio needed to visually embody the same energy I was channeling, as a declaration.

The installation began with drawing. I used a brush dipped in gouache, following the line without correction. The drawn line is central. It carries where the hand moved quickly, where it slowed and where it held. That is what gives the work presence in a room. It registers movement.

The flowers were painted from life in the studio. It mattered that they came from something living, that what moved through soil, stem, and bloom could move directly into the work. I’ve watched my garden long enough to trust what returns.

The pillows hold a different kind of weight. I made them on my grandmother’s sewing machine, the same one she taught me to use as a child. She worked with her hands. She cooked and cleaned and sewed, and that was how she cared for the people around her. Sitting at her machine, I felt that. This work, in its own way, is the same act.

Each pillow carries its own thread within the larger field of Becoming Eros. The pomegranate marks descent and return. The snake holds the memory of shedding. The black narcissus, like the black hares, carries light and dark without separation.

I spent considerable time understanding the hare before allowing it into the work. It lives at the threshold, active at twilight, inhabiting the space between what is known and what is not yet visible. Across time and culture it appears as a guide, a presence at the crossing, associated with cycles, with return, with what begins again.

This installation is the visual manifestation of the arc of a book in progress. It holds what I've claimed for myself: the freedom to make without second-guessing, the willingness to remain at the threshold and the discipline to stay with what arrives.

It’s also an offering.

This work is made to be lived with, not observed from a distance. It asks for a space where life is actively unfolding and it gives accordingly. Wherever it lives, in a home, a studio, or an architectural space, it registers as presence. I want it in rooms where people are reaching toward something. That is where it belongs, and where it does its work.

Inquiries about the Becoming Eros series are welcome. More on the installation here.

_______________________________________

Ann Latinovich Fine Art Studio & Co
(872) 363-8951
creative@annlatinovich.com
www.annlatinovich.com

If you missed the piece earlier this week on how the Becoming Eros installation began, you can find it here.

I laugh when I look at this photograph because I meant to capture myself in action, sewing the pieces that would become part of the Becoming Eros installation. Instead all I see is plants. My nest.

Some of these plants have been with me for more than ten years. They’re regularly trimmed and shared, propagated and passed on. Growth in this studio is never hoarded, and that’s the point.

The studio is the living embodiment of everything the work is about. Vitality, curiosity, growth, and the force that moves life toward aliveness. Eros isn’t only on the wall. It’s in the roots, the soil, the light coming through the window, the leaves leaning toward it.

At home, Spring flowers are just breaking ground. Both the garden and the studio have always been part of how I understand the work I make. Growing from seed teaches patience in a way that nothing else quite does. Plants move slowly but they’re never still. Blossoms arrive almost overnight after weeks or months of quiet preparation. I call this process from the ground up, from seed to soil to the art on the wall. It’s hands on, organic, and for me, genuinely healing.

The same rhythm lives in the studio. Large leaves take as much space as they need while the work takes shape nearby. The installation that now fills the wall emerged slowly from that atmosphere, the same way a garden does, in cycles that can’t be forced.

I’ve built many nests in my life and this one has been very good to me. What the garden gives back always exceeds the work it requires, and what this studio gives back has shaped everything I make.

Becoming Eros didn’t arrive as a single idea. It grew from an ecosystem that’s been quietly breathing this work for years.

A few behind the scenes images of the installation in progress are below. Next week the work moves off the studio wall and into the world.

The photograph shows me standing high on a ladder in my studio, hammer in one hand.

When I climbed down from the ladder to see what the camera had caught, I recognized something in my own face I hadn’t expected. Sheer joy, and I’ve been sitting with that ever since, with what it means to see it so plainly and what it took to get there.

Over the last several years I have been working toward a body of work I now call Becoming Eros. For me, Eros is not a decorative idea about romance or sensuality. It is the force that moves life toward vitality, curiosity, creativity, and connection. It carries the alchemy that allows something new to come into existence.

Eros has never been absent from my studio. If anything, it’s the place where it has always been most alive.

Outside the studio I sometimes negotiated with that force. Like many people, I learned early how to arrange myself for approval, survival and the expectations of others. Over time I began to recognize the tension between those two worlds. The studio held vitality. The life surrounding it sometimes asked for restraint.

Becoming Eros has grown from that tension, from what happens at the boundary between erasure and emergence, and the moment a woman begins to reclaim authorship of her life.

The installation behind me in that photograph grew from that realization. I didn’t build it for a collector or a gallery wall. I built it for my own wall. A reminder of the force that has always lived in the work, and the life that must now meet it.

When I look back on a lifetime of making art, the strongest current running through it has always been honesty. What feels different now is the clarity, a depth that comes from lived experience. The drawn marks in this work carry the same spirit I had as a child, before judgment arrived. Unguarded, curious, free. That quality is not incidental. It is the work.

The photograph of me on that ladder marks the beginning of a new chapter. Not because everything changed that day, but because the life and the work were finally visible to each other.

Standing there on that ladder after install, I could see it too.

Becoming Eros is moving from the studio into the world. Later this week, a closer look at the studio where it all begins.

Leave it to Khloé Kardashian, a woman whose body has been picked apart in the public eye for as long as I can remember, to offer a pair of jeans I’ll never take off. Good American fits my completely unreasonable waist-to-hip ratio and isn’t trying to make me smaller. As a tall woman, I’ve never owned a pair that actually fit in width and height at the same time. Not once.

I don’t know her, but I know something about having a body that invites public commentary. When something finally fits without asking you to shrink, it feels like relief.

I only wish I’d had them a week earlier, when I was standing at the ocean’s edge taking self-portraits. I would have liked to celebrate with the ocean, which I’ve always thought of as a kind of mother, finally wearing something that fit me the way I deserved.

Since we’re being frank, I’ll add something else. These jeans make my bottom look really good. So good that this morning, while the power was out in my studio and I was puttering around in the dark waiting for the lights to come back on, I caught a glimpse of myself. I was on a call with a close friend and blurted out, “Hey, can I send you a picture of my ass?”

The second the words left my mouth I felt immediate shame, but without missing a beat she said, “Absolutely. I’d love to celebrate your body with you.” May everyone have a friend like that. And if you know anything about my history with my body, the fact that I paused long enough to admire myself in the mirror feels like a small miracle.

Every woman I know has some kind of relationship with jeans. For most of us it’s complicated.

Mine started early with Brooke Shields, Calvin Klein, and the cruel arithmetic of adolescence. I grew up in a world where belonging had a size attached to it. I remember a very specific, aching longing for a pair of gold-embroidered jeans, just to fit in. That longing became its own kind of education. I was going to spend a lifetime learning to accept that I would never quite fit in. I find that phrase deeply ironic now.

Growing up, the most pointed attention always landed on the same place. Family had opinions about my body and shared them freely. Children are helpless against that kind of shaming and it leaves a mark. Despite years of therapy, those old voices still surface occasionally, quiet but insistent, requiring daily and deliberate release.

I feel the audacity of writing about my rear end while the world feels like it’s coming apart. I’ve lost sleep over things that matter far more than this. Writing about my body feels like a narcissistic luxury. But if I feel good about anything today, it’s this, and I think that’s worth something. So I’m writing about it, and I’m inviting you to do the same. Name, out loud or quietly to yourself, whatever small thing is making you feel good today. We need more of that right now, not less.

I’m hearing a voice in my head joking: “So Ann, how big are we actually talking?”

I’m tall, which confuses people at first. But every so often when I slide into the front seat of a car, the driver glances over and asks if I want to put the seat down. I tell them it’s already all the way down. They don’t believe me. They reach across and try the lever themselves, convinced something must be wrong.

Thinking here we go again, I say, “You don’t understand. I just have a really big ass. This is where I sit.”

Silence usually follows. I’ve learned to let it.

While visiting the ocean last week, a group of women flagged me down on the beach and asked me to take their photo. They didn’t know I was a professional photographer, which I always find quietly funny. I crouched down slightly, nothing dramatic, just a natural angle, thinking about how to give them a hero shot. Within seconds all of them called out at once: “Can you go higher?”

My heart broke a little. I’ve spent twenty years behind a camera watching women flinch from angles, afraid of what a lens might expose. I always understood it and always honored the request. I was crushed by it too, every time, because I knew exactly what they were afraid of. I’d spent a lifetime afraid of the same thing.

That moment stayed with me. I didn't want to be the kind of woman that barks at a stranger who's doing me a favor, out of fear of a bad angle (I’ve been that woman). So that evening I turned the camera on myself. I set it near my feet and shot straight up, standing at the place where the water meets the shore. That spot has always meant something to me. The ocean never negotiates with itself. It does what it needs to do, in its own rhythm, without apology. I wanted to borrow a little of that. I let the wind blow and my body fill the frame.

Later it occurred to me that something else had happened in that moment.

When I photographed those women earlier that day, I hadn’t been trying to make them thinner. I had been trying to show them to themselves as powerful. I wanted them to see the joy and force of who they were in that moment together.

When I turned the camera on myself that evening and allowed the angle to exaggerate rather than minimize, I realized the impulse was the same. Something in me had stopped negotiating with the gaze. I wasn’t trying to disappear inside the photograph anymore. I was letting the body take up the space it actually occupies.

That realization felt strangely familiar because it’s the same territory I’ve been exploring in the studio while working on the Becoming Eros series.

The paintings and sculptures live on the wall, but the force behind them doesn’t stay there. It appears in ordinary moments of life. It’s in the wind filling a dress at the edge of the ocean. In a friend who celebrates a photograph instead of apologizing for it. In the quiet decision to stop shrinking.

I know someone who deliberately chose the most unflattering headshot possible for his professional website. Flat lighting, no favors. When I told him I didn’t like it he said he’d done it on purpose, that he wanted to release himself from any expectation that he had to look a certain way to earn acceptance. I’d never heard anyone say that out loud before, especially not in a professional context, and I’ve never forgotten it.

That’s what I’m reaching for. I don’t need perfection or approval. Just the freedom to take up the space I actually occupy in a photograph, in a room, and in my own life.

Whatever’s making you feel good today, your hair, your laugh, the way your coffee tasted this morning, let yourself have it. Fully. Without the caveat or disclaimer, and without shrinking it down to something that feels safer to admit.

We’ve spent enough time trying to fit in. Take up the space.

I’ve noticed a particular pattern in places where people gather around ideas like creativity, healing, spirituality, or play. The language of depth moves easily through those spaces but the practice that produces depth does not. Many people learn to speak about aliveness with impressive fluency while quietly arranging their lives in ways that keep them at a safe distance from what aliveness really requires.

People seem to want proximity. They’re drawn to the atmosphere around transformation, to the kind of glow that appears around people who’ve spent long stretches of time inside their own excavation. Standing near that atmosphere can feel powerful for a moment. Sometimes that’s mistaken for participation.

That confusion shows up most clearly when people talk about play.

Play is often imagined as something light or charming, but the kind of play I’m talking about grows out of long contact with uncertainty. It asks a person to stay present while their familiar sense of identity loosens and the defenses they rely on begin to fall away. Shame and confusion can appear in that territory, but something else begins to open there too. A kind of curiosity that becomes possible when someone stops arranging themselves for approval.

Most of the conditions that allow this kind of play seem to arrive through experiences people would never choose for themselves. Loss, disillusionment, grief, and sustained contact with one’s own limits tend to reshape a person’s inner life in ways that make genuine play possible later on. Over time someone learns how to remain in the room even when the version of themselves they relied on no longer holds together.

The word play sounds innocent when we say it out loud but the process that produces it usually isn’t.

Depth carries a strange kind of magnetism. People who’ve spent time inside their own material often develop a quiet gravity. Others feel something in that gravity and move toward it, sometimes placing their own unfinished material into the nearest container that seems capable of holding it.

When that happens often enough, the container can start to be mistaken for a service.

In my own life, creativity didn’t arrive through inspiration or ambition. It grew out of silence, psychological injury, violence, and long periods of attention directed toward experiences that offered very little relief. The work that followed began as a way to survive. Over time survival opened into curiosity, and curiosity eventually created space for play.

Living this way produces a certain sensitivity to imitation. It becomes easier to recognize when vulnerability is being rehearsed rather than lived, or when insight is repeated convincingly without ever entering the body of a life. It’s possible for the language of transformation to circulate comfortably in rooms where no one is actually planning to rearrange themselves.

When you see the pattern often enough, observation quietly replaces judgment.

Something else becomes visible too. When people say they want to play with someone whose life has become their research, what they’re really asking for requires a certain willingness. Real play tends to loosen identity. People lose face and assumptions fall apart. Shame appears and the impulse to retreat becomes strong. Yet if someone stays long enough, curiosity begins to hold the room open and something genuinely new can form between people.

There’s another pattern that becomes visible over time as well.

Pedestals are often mistaken for compliments, but they tend to function more like walls. When someone places you above them, the relationship quietly reorganizes itself so that closeness becomes impossible. The emotional weight of the encounter gets handed upward. That weight usually includes projection, unlived longing, and the need for you to remain elevated so they can stay comfortable where they are.

Real play requires something much simpler and much rarer. It requires a peer. Someone who trusts themselves enough not to need you to be more than human. Someone who arrives at eye level and is willing to be ordinary alongside you. That willingness opens a room in a way admiration never can.

Without that willingness, proximity continues to replace participation.

I find myself thinking often about how many people are drawn toward light while remaining cautious around flame. Depth tends to attract attention, yet participating in depth asks for endurance.

People who live inside the work are not there to animate someone else’s unlived life. They’re building structures that carry pulse and weight. Even when they appear capable of carrying that weight alone, they still long for something very simple. They long for encounters with people who do not flinch at truth, who continue their own excavation quietly, and who remain present when the ground shifts beneath their ideas about themselves.

When people say they want to play, the question that slowly reveals itself is surprisingly straightforward: What have you stayed with long enough for it to change you.

Anyone doing that work somewhere, quietly and without spectacle, is already part of the same landscape. You are not alone.