"To move with the wild forces of deep emotion and spiritual experience without fear."
Painted live in front of a crowd as part of Pieces of Pullman, a collaborative mural festival at Pullman Yards that brought together a slate of Atlanta artists to activate the yard in a single weekend. The wall went up in the middle of the event. Everything you see was made in the open.
True Strength is part of a longer-running thread in my work where I use the tarot — not as mysticism, but as a compositional and emotional vocabulary. The Strength card doesn't show a warrior. It shows a woman gently closing the jaws of a lion. The message underneath it is what I was after: that real strength is the ability to soothe what's wild inside you and move with it, rather than against it.
I painted it from inside a season of my own life when I was trying to learn exactly that. The figure at the center of the composition is holding the energy the way I was trying to learn to hold mine — with fearlessness and courage, but also with tenderness. The palette is bold and the movement is organic on purpose. The piece isn't meant to be decorative.
It's the first time I felt the figurative and symbolic threads in my practice click fully into the street-art vocabulary I'd been working in. Looking back from here, it's where a lot of what I do now began.