The Deep Pain of Moms Lost

This piece begins where grief rarely admits it starts: in anger. The dominant greens were chosen instinctively to represent loss: alive, complex, and refusing to be quiet. The dark voids scattered throughout the composition are the absences, the mother-shaped holes that no amount of love could fill. The pink bursts, applied with a homemade star-shaped mark-maker, are the mothers themselves, vivid and present, but not in control of the canvas. The grid marks are doubled scratches, one set for each mother, signifying the twice-over work of scratching back to myself. The drips fall from the bottom like tears the painting refused to hold in. Created on Mother’s Day 2026, this piece represents the moment I said goodbye—not to two women, but to the mother I never had.