She Was The First To See (2025)

She Was the First to See is one of the most hauntingly quiet works in The Damnation Project. The portrait depicts a young woman caught in a moment of unbearable recognition. Her expression is neither fear nor sorrow, but the fragile, stunned calm of someone who understands too much. Thick black tears streak down her face, an unmistakable motif in Cox’s lexicon of damnation.

⤷ This painting captures the moment before hysteria, when clarity itself becomes a wound. The muted palette of ochres and greys wraps the figure in stillness, while the oil-like tears break the illusion of sanctity. Her plain dress and soft lighting recall historical portraiture, but the emotional tone is modern—existential, psychological, almost forensic in its intimacy.

The title suggests both tragedy and prophecy. She was the first to see what others could not, and in seeing, became changed by it. In The Damnation Project, she is the reluctant witness, the one who recognizes the system of decay not as punishment, but as inheritance.