"Out There"

She stands naked before infinity — and she is not small.

In "Out There," a woman in luminous blue faces a vast, swirling nebula, a cosmic womb of fire-red and stardust gold. She is nude, not vulnerable but utterly honest. No armor, no story, just skin against the cosmos.

In her hands she holds something strange and biomorphic, like a deep-sea creature or a piece of her own dreaming mind, tentacles of dark blue thought wrapping around her head.

The relationship is the oldest one there is: the Human and the Infinite. The nebula looms like a giant eye, a portal, a birth canal of stars. The brilliant suns around her are not distant — they flare in sharp, crystalline crosses, as if responding to her. She is not looking at space.

She is in conversation with it.Is she offering her thoughts to the Universe? Or is the Universe pouring its mysteries into her?

The painting holds that tension — are we out there, or is "out there" inside us?Painted in deep, velvety blacks set ablaze with vermillion, ochre and electric blue, this is a painting about awe.

About that moment when you realize how unimaginably vast it all is, and instead of feeling afraid, you feel like you belong.