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 Weathered Life

This is the first piece of Weathered Women.

There is nothing in life that weathers a soul more than suffering. And yet, intense suffering creates a unique ability to grow into the kind of people I believe we were intended to become. It has the ability to erode the edges of a person’s heart, enabling a new perspective to sprout. They begin to see with their spirit rather than their mind. It opens the gate to a type of maturity that few in the west ever attain or even recognize.

So I began with an image seen in the east: A young girl has travelled far from her desert home in an attempt to gather some supplies for the day. Already she has much on her back as the sun has risen. She has a long and weary day ahead, yet she cannot think of herself in any way. Her family and community are dependent on her, just as she is on them. Every day is a struggle for survival.

The young woman’s cracked and weathered appearance reflects her broken and rough life, in which much suffering has occurred. And yet, her only other visible sign of this is the burden she carries on her back ― that of having to care for a child before becoming an adult herself.

However, even though the child is so young and innocent that it can’t fathom the world of hardship its mother lives in every day, it still shows us the continuation of life, lessons learned, and the hope for a better day.

A Weathered Life honestly acknowledges the challenges in life while not forgetting about the lessons learned and the journey of inner growth. They give us hope that by living through today, we’ll eventually wake up to a brighter sunrise because sometimes hope is the only thing that keeps up going.