Weathered Women: A Series

This trilogy centers around the theme of beauty and hope in the midst of intense suffering. Each painting depicts a visibly weathered African female, representing those that suffer at the hands of everything that’s wrong with the world we live in. Inferiority, lack of education, robbed childhoods, vulnerability to abuse and mistreatment, helplessness, lack of opportunities, suffering, loss of life, and on and on it goes. All of these pains are well known to those in poverty. 

However, breaking the cycle of poverty is something that we have never managed to accomplish despite all our great achievements across history. Despite the power and affluence we enjoy as a first-world country. But it is within these weathered and broken souls, forged in suffering, that a treasure takes form — a truth that can’t be known except by one who has suffered. 

The path through suffering to this treasure is a long and arduous journey, and it’s this journey that Weathered Women shows through the progression in the individual pieces. The first piece, A Weathered Life, opens the series up with the sun's rising, which then progresses to a clear afternoon blue with A Parched Land, and finally drawing to a sunset close with A Desolate Place. This series isn’t just about the lives of others, though. Each piece came about as a direct result of the weathered journey in my own life and represented the point I was at when painting the piece.

A Desolate Place

This is the third piece of Weathered Women. 

Desolate: a godforsaken wasteland. This is a phrase that has described the inner workings of my life for many years now. Circumstances have caused everything I thought I knew to be true and real to come down crashing around me. Few are comfortable even hearing about it. It threatens what they believe to be true because few people know how to accept that they could live in a world so harsh. And when someone is threatened, they put all their energy into a strong defence. I become a problem to be fixed until I forsake my emotions and deny this reality that is so threatening to other people’s worldview; I can only be viewed as a person when I am no longer a threat. 

While exploring this godforsaken wasteland within my heart, I have discovered the ugliness of this world, dressed up to look real nice. I have come to see that the people who have truly suffered and walked through their own desolate place to come out the other side are few and far between. To them, I can be viewed as a person because they already know that they know nothing. There is nothing that I can threaten; likewise, there are no glib responses to give, just a sincere understanding that they have no answers. 

When considering difficult times, many people say they would do it all over again because of what it brought out in them and their life. I’m not in that place. I don’t know if I ever will be. I like to think that the individuals that say this truly haven’t suffered enough. Perhaps I’ve become a little callous. Maybe in time, I, too, will believe this. When reflecting on where I am, I believe the sun may be setting on this period of my life. I wouldn’t ever want to relive it, but I have been able to see the radiant sky, a little beauty in the midst of a cracked wasteland. 

A Desolate Place features a young girl and her child, similar to A Weathered Life. However, she now looks back into the setting sun and all the lands she has journeyed through to get this far. She sees the desolation of those lands and still feels the suffering of the paths she walked, and yet at the same time, she can see the sunset and appreciate the beauty those lands lend to the sky. That paradox of simultaneous beauty and suffering is the treasure she walks away with, a wisdom beyond her years.