I am pleased with her pose, the way she sits with such delicacy, perfect and human. There is of course, a certain sense of the melancholic to her. This is common to pretty much all of my works to date.
The idea of light and dark, yin and yang, in the language of the Dao (though I admit I a, hardly conversant) – where there is good there is bad, heat there is cold. In my experience this has proven to be the case not in the spiritual sense (or in karma, which doesn't’t really work if you take reincarnation out of the picture.. you know.. babies born with AIDS?) It also pervades, no it GOVERNS everything that we do within the bounds of the material world.
I am about as much of an atheist as a person can be (this does’t mean that I do not respect the beliefs of others!)
If the idea of an afterlife is removed from the equation, then to me the moments, the time that we have, is not lessened in value. In an absolute sense, what we have, this life – each week day hour minute second is in actuality made infinitely more precious. It must mean more to us, because this is all that we have.
It means also that the responsibility for living well, for living to the hilt with everything within us lies with us, in our hearts and minds. With our love, our strength, the veracity and purity of our actions.

But it is also in some ways a bleak way of looking at the world. Because to me, these moments must end. They must.

So this piece, as almost every one of my others, has this attempt at beauty, and it has an undercurrent, a swelling, of sorrow.

Because life is beautiful. And because life is also sad. (Yes, I know, this is a slightly edited version of something I wrote on another piece. Not sorry. Tired.)