Holy Ones, 2026

Holiness has often been imagined as radiant, beautiful, and distant from the corruption of the world. Yet throughout history the sacred has just as often appeared in wildernesses, graveyards, deserts, and places abandoned by ordinary life. Holy Ones imagines sanctity not as perfection but as transformation. These spectral figures seem to have emerged from the earth itself, their bodies woven from roots, branches, weathered cloth, and forgotten bones. Faces appear and disappear within their forms like souls carried within a single body, while a luminous halo crowns the central figure—not to answer our questions, but to deepen them. The familiar symbols of sainthood remain, yet they inhabit beings that resist every comfortable expectation.

The painting draws upon the ancient understanding of the numinous: the experience of encountering something wholly other—at once terrifying, mysterious, and profoundly compelling. In many traditions the truly holy is not merely comforting but overwhelming, exposing the limits of human understanding. These figures stand among skulls, crude wooden crosses, and silent trees, occupying the threshold between death and resurrection, memory and eternity. Their blank, watchful faces offer neither condemnation nor welcome. They simply remain, inviting the viewer to consider that the sacred may dwell not only in cathedrals and icons, but also in forgotten places where the veil between worlds has grown thin.

Reverse: Figure study.