The Weeper (2024)

The Weeper (2024) continues my exploration of the feminine as both witness and vessel. The portrait captures a figure suspended in quiet devastation, her tears rendered not as water but as black fluid — a visual manifestation of grief that stains rather than cleanses.

⤷ The painting borrows its composition from devotional portraiture, recalling saints or martyrs depicted mid-revelation. Yet there’s no divinity here, only exhaustion. The figure’s eyes are red-rimmed, her face luminous against a shroud of darkness. From her left eye, a stream of black liquid seeps downward, congealing like oil. It suggests something internal forced outward — a sorrow too dense to dissolve.

I wanted this piece to feel suffocatingly intimate, like the viewer has intruded on a moment of private collapse. The circular format reinforces that closeness; it acts almost like a locket or a peephole, trapping her forever in her moment of undoing.

The Weeper exists within The Damnation Project, a series that investigates the aesthetics of suffering and sanctity in female-coded bodies. Here, the act of weeping becomes both rebellion and ritual. She cries not for forgiveness but for recognition. The black tears speak of contamination — of mourning that refuses to be pretty or redemptive.

Her expression is restrained, but the darkness crawling down her face betrays the truth: she is leaking what the world refuses to hold. The piece reflects the idea that women are often expected to suffer beautifully, to contain pain in ways that are consumable. I wanted her to resist that. The tears are not graceful; they rot what they touch.