The title of this piece, "Hope," is perhaps the most crucial element, and its dissonance with the image is intentional. We are conditioned to think of hope as a light, optimistic force. This painting is about what hope feels like when it is not a choice, but a necessity—when it is a heavy, grim, and exhausting act of survival. This is not the hope of the joyful, but the hope of the haunted.

The figures in the piece are not separate individuals, but rather a trinity of a single, fractured consciousness. The central figure is the present self, worn down and weary, whose face bears the geography of past sorrows. The adjacent figures are the echoes of what has been endured—the screaming void of past trauma, the broken, childlike remnant of lost innocence. They are a collective, their forms bleeding into one another to show how the past is never separate from the present.

The most prominent features are the black, hollowed-out voids where their eyes should be. These are not symbols of blindness, but of having seen too much. They are the immense emptiness left behind by disappointment, the abyss one must stare into while still trying to look forward. In this context, they represent the profound cost of hope—the wounds that are carried, the parts of the soul that have been scooped out by the sheer effort of enduring.

The background is a raw and visual play on the tension between hope and despair. A visceral crimson, representing the weight of memory and the reality of pain, actively pushes against a stark, encroaching sunlight. These are not two separate states, but warring forces locked in a perpetual struggle. The figures exist within this violent equilibrium, simultaneously engulfed by the despair that stains their past and illuminated by a hope that refuses to be extinguished. The background is not a setting, but the external manifestation of their internal war.

This work, therefore, seeks to redefine hope. It is not an erasure of pain, but the decision to carry that pain forward. It is the quiet, stubborn refusal to fully collapse, even when you are hollowed out, broken, and surrounded by the ghosts of your own history. It is a portrait of the immense weight and profound courage of simply continuing to exist.