MEDIUM: Watercolor on paper

DATE: 2025

Between the Dowager and the Eunuch

Some images arrive like answers. Others feel more like questions.

This one came to me as a quiet confrontation between two versions of the self: the part that still meets the world with fragile wonder, and the part shaped by sharpened, alert experience. As I worked, it felt less like I was building a figure and more like I was uncovering parts already there.

What emerged is a kind of a totem. The lower figure can be a naive presence—soft and searching. Above it, a fractured watcher is made from plans, memory, and fear. They don’t resolve into one another. They hold tension. And that tension feels familiar.

The rounded pink face with circular glasses, wide eyes, and a slightly uncertain mouth carries vulnerability, the part of us that still looks outward with curiosity and tries to understand. The glasses matter. They suggest perception, but not clarity. We don’t see cleanly; we see through memory, emotion, and old wounds.

Above it sits a second presence, more abstract and more unsettled. A vertical green form cuts through the face like a blade or an axis. That split becomes central: reason against instinct, control against chaos. The upper figure isn’t whole. It’s assembled. It feels like consciousness under pressure.

Fan-like shapes rise from the head, almost like a crown that can’t quite settle. They radiate outward like thoughts or signals—suggesting authority, but not comfort. This isn’t wisdom at rest. It’s awareness that won’t switch off.

Behind it, yellow circular forms create a charged field. They echo a halo, but not a sacred one. The light here reveals—and exposes.

And then there are the teeth—s harp, triangular, hard to ignore. They cut through the softness of the watercolor and introduce something feral. Even the most reflective parts of us carry an edge.

I kept the palette restrained—pale pinks, yellows, greens, muted blues—and let transparency do most of the emotional work. The colors feel tentative, like the image is still surfacing.

That softness is interrupted by harsher elements: the central divide, the angular teeth, the asymmetry.  The emptiness around the figures becomes part of the psychology. It lets the images hover between dream and diagnosis.

What stays with me is the friction between the two parts. The lower face feels open, almost naïve. The upper one is watchful, hard to trust.

We don’t move through life as a single, stable self. We move as layers. Some are soft. Some are protective. Some become so sharp they start to intimidate even us.

This piece lives in that narrow space where innocence and awareness meet—and don’t quite reconcile.

Complexity doesn’t erase innocence and awareness. Complexity gathers around it.

The structures we build to survive can also obscure what’s most open in us. But the answer isn’t to choose one over the other.

The eunuch looks up. The dowager looks down.

We can learn to live with both.