Collateral beauty I

Artwork story

I keep finding that beauty hides in strange places- even inside grief, loneliness and inside the versions of ourselves we had to fight to become. This painting is part for a body of work that sees identity as a process not product. Becoming is messy. It can feel like breaking. But the person you are after the dark, that's beauty too. Not despite the hard part but because of them. The title isn't ironic. Sometimes beauty really is collateral, a by-product of what you had to endure to get there. Beauty didn't come after the hard parts, it grew from them.

This work was started in late 2024, but I knew where it was heading when I picked it up again in 2026.