Sometimes a song and a painting arrive at the same place by different roads.
While working on this piece I kept returning to the imagery from the Shattered Goddess song Brambles that I wrote. The lyrics speak about moving through a thicket of thorns in order to reach the place where something deeper began. It is not a path of comfort. It is a path of persistence.
“Follow the brambles down, down, down to the hidden ground
Every wound I bear shows me the way there.”
That idea shaped the painting.
The figure shields the heart while thorned branches wrap across the body. Scratches mark the skin where the thorns have caught and dragged. Yet the brambles do not simply imprison the figure. They form a path downward, spiraling toward the center of the body where the light gathers.
The song suggests that wounds can become a map. Each mark left by the thorns shows where the traveler has passed. Instead of avoiding the bramble patch, the voice in the song chooses to follow it deeper.
“The thorns may make me bleed, but I must know the seed.”
In nature, brambles are protective plants. Their thorns keep larger creatures away while sheltering smaller life within the tangled growth. They are harsh on the outside, yet they guard something living at their center.
Human experience often works the same way. We accumulate scars, defenses, and memories that grow around us like a dense patch of thorns. At first they seem only painful. Over time they begin to reveal something else: a record of the path we have taken.
The painting reflects that moment. The figure is wounded, yet still illuminated from within. The brambles press inward, but they also guide the eye downward toward the place where life begins again.
Sometimes the way forward is not around the thorns.
Sometimes the way forward is through them.
