The Soft Violence of Being Whole

MEDIUM: Watercolor on textured paper

DATE: 2025

The Soft Violence of Being Whole

This week, I confronted a more intimate and unsettling truth—one that lives at the intersection of emotion and instinct, where the boundaries we try to impose simply do not exist.

At the center of this piece stands a fractured, composite being part human, part something undefined, resisting any singular identity. The face is divided into subtle tension. One eye remains exposed and human; the other is encircled by a mechanical ring, suggesting two modes of perception—feeling and analysis, intuition, and observation. Above, elongated horn-like forms stretch upward toward a suspended sphere, a symbol that hovers just out of reach, perhaps representing an idea, a burden, or an unattainable clarity.

The background is split into four distinct color fields—red, blue, yellow, and gray—each evoking a different emotional state. Red pulses with chaos and urgency. Blue recedes into introspection. Yellow vibrates with unstable vitality. Gray settles into numb ambiguity. These are not merely colors, but psychological climates coexisting within the same space, much like the figure itself.

Surrounding the central form are animalistic companions—a goat, a bird, a feline-like creature, and, most importantly, a small yellow figure at the core. These beings read as extensions of identity: instinct, observation, vulnerability, and distortion.

The yellow entity is crucial. Its body is structured around a heart embedded at its center, directly connected to its genitals. This is not symbolic subtlety, but anatomical truth within the surreal logic of the piece. Heart and desire are fused into a single system, forming a continuous channel between emotion and physical impulse. It becomes the raw core of the composition, the place where feeling and instinct are not separate forces, but one.

I allowed the linework to remain imperfect, almost hesitant in places, preserving the human touch and resisting over-refinement. The graphite textures in the central figure create a grounded, tactile presence, while the watercolor background expands freely, bleeding across its quadrants with bold certainty.

This contrast mirrors the internal structure of the work: the figure attempts containment, while the world around it refuses boundaries.

The surrounding creatures are drawn more loosely, as if they emerged without filtration, directly from the subconscious. Their forms are less controlled, less concerned with logic, reinforcing their role as fragments of inner experience rather than external realities.

There is quiet discomfort embedded in this work—not aggressive, but persistent. The viewer is asked to sit with something they may instinctively wish to separate: the merging of love and desire, vulnerability, and instinct.

The central yellow figure intensifies that discomfort. It refuses any romanticized notion of emotion as pure or detached. Instead, it insists that feeling is entangled with the body, with impulse, with need.

And yet, despite this tension, the composition holds. Nothing collapses. Nothing dominates. The chaos is contained—not resolved, but balanced.

While creating this piece, I kept returning to the way we are taught to divide ourselves—to elevate certain parts while suppressing others. Emotion is often idealized, while desire is controlled, hidden, or made shameful.

This work resists that division.

The heart and the body are not separate narratives. They are part of the same sentence.

As Egon Schiele suggested through his own raw explorations of the human form, truth in art is often found where comfort ends.

You are not divided because you are flawed.
You are complex because you are whole.

The connection between your heart and your instincts is not something to fear or erase. It is something to understand.

Balance does not come from separation—
it comes from acknowledging that even your most contradictory parts are speaking the same language, only in different tones.