Sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table, I painted a screaming black face with red bubbles trapped inside its mouth.
I didn’t know it then, but Gaman would keep returning whenever life became too heavy to carry. After losing a friend to suicide. After losing the grandmother who raised me to cancer. When the war in Ukraine began. In moments of grief, fear and devastation, I found myself painting the same face again and again.
It took me more than a decade of living in Japan, and later moving to Los Angeles, to understand what I had been painting all along.
Gaman carries everything inside—pain, fear, grief, anger and words left unspoken.
Rather than expressing them, Gaman absorbs them, believing that enduring is strength.
