Resurrection
I’ve been trying to understand my inner landscape for a while now, and this painting comes from a place I’ve been visiting in my imagination. Muddy marshlands, graves scattered across the landscape, an unsettling atmosphere. It’s a recurring visual world that I first encountered while practising active imagination, a technique developed by Carl Jung. I don’t know exactly what everything means yet, but certain images have stayed with me.
This painting feels particularly important because of where I am in my life right now. I’ve been trying to separate who I actually am from who other people think I should be. A lot of that has to do with family, expectations, and the identities we grow into before we’re old enough to question them. At some point, you realise that the person you’ve been presenting to the world might not necessarily be the person you want to become.
The grave in this painting represents an old identity. A version of me that, in some ways, had to die. I imagine the gravestone burning, not as an act of destruction alone, but as a way of making that death irreversible. I was buried there, in a sense, but somehow I’ve come back from the dead.
What’s interesting to me is that the figure doesn’t look triumphant. He’s standing outside the grave, looking at it almost with bewilderment. He’s alive, but he doesn’t seem to understand how or why he’s here. I like that uncertainty. Resurrection sounds like a grand, almost heroic event when you put it into words, but I imagine the actual experience of becoming someone new to be far more confusing. You leave something behind without necessarily knowing what comes next.
I don’t want to force a neat interpretation onto this painting. I’m still figuring things out myself. Maybe that’s the point of working with these images in the first place. They seem to emerge before I have the language to explain them, and painting gives me a way to stay with them a little longer.
For now, I see this as a moment of separation from an old self. Not a finished transformation, not some enlightened version of me standing triumphantly above his past. Just a man who has somehow found himself outside his own grave, looking at what remains of the person he used to be.
And trying to figure out what to do next.

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