"Approaching the Inner Child", Oil on Canvas, 24" x 30", 2025
In this image, a young boy sits atop a vast Buddha hand, its fingers forming the Cincihna mudra, an ancient gesture of spiritual understanding. He cradles the morning sun in his open palm, offering it to a colossal psychedelic being with two faces. The creature’s arms taper into tightly coiled weapons, yet its form resists singular identity: a distorted human visage, a skull swelling into exposed frontal lobes swathed in cloth, a serpentine neck sprouting vestigial mouths and eyes, and two luminous womb-like chambers glowing with biological organs.
Behind the boy, a towering anthropomorphic bear rests its paw gently against his back, radiating solidarity and guardianship. Beneath the Buddha hand, two more companions keep watch: a checkered child’s doll and a curious purple rabbit.
The beast’s primary weapon blossoms in radiant concentric layers, like a flower vibrating across dimensions, its claws multiplying into endless echoes that suggest an ability to strike not just through space and time, but into the subconscious itself. Yet in this meeting, its ferocity remains subdued. The Buddha hand teasingly pinches one of the claws, holding it out for the rabbit’s curious inspection. The weapon does not resist. The beast does not attack. Even so, its frightened secondary face betrays unease, one long tooth piercing a finger of the hand that restrains it.
In this encounter, the psychedelic beast emerges not as a predator but as a defensive outgrowth; an armored projection of the psyche standing guard over the inner child. Though formidable in its capacity for harm, it submits to the boy’s serenity. The child’s offering of the sun becomes a symbol of immutable vitality, a reminder that the core of innocence contains its own unassailable essence. In this exchange, the beast is released from its grim nature, invited toward transformation from fear and violence.
Ultimately, this vision becomes a reconciliation of the psyche: the meeting of the inner child with the monstrous, the fragile with the formidable, and the nexus of peace found between them. In this way, it symbolizes a step on the path toward the attainment of inner peace.