Arctic Memory

“Some lights make us remember we are small in the best possible way.

An aurora burns across a tundra. The paint itself has been laid on so thickly that the light has become substance — something you feel you could touch, if only the canvas were closer.

There are experiences in every life that briefly reset the scale of our worries. A birth. A death. A sky so wide the mind cannot keep up with it. Afterward, the problems that had felt enormous seem, for a while, appropriately sized. We had simply lost perspective and hadn’t noticed.

This painting isn’t asking you to travel north.

It’s asking you to remember the moment your own scale last got put right.

When did you last look at something so vast that it changed the size of you — and how quickly did the world talk you back out of it?”