In painting this series, I found myself exploring more than the divine feminine alone. I was drawn into the idea of form and formlessness, and into the simultaneous, contrasting experiences of separation and unity coexisting within a single presence.

 

Within the Indian tradition, Shakti is both form and formless. In her formlessness, she is the limitless, dynamic, feminine force from which all creation and the universe arise. Within the human body, she is inner strength, breath, and the life force within everyone.

 

When she takes personified form, she becomes goddess: as Durga, she embodies protective power and fierce, compassionate love; as Kali, she embodies transformation and the destruction of the ego; as Parvati, she embodies love, devotion, and divine harmony. In the fullest telling, these are not three separate goddesses but three faces of one: Durga and Kali are often described as fierce aspects of Parvati herself, all of them expressions of a single supreme Devi. And in the classical framing, Shakti is rarely spoken of alone; she is paired with Shiva as her consort and counterpart, energy inseparable from consciousness, one incomplete without the other.

 

These are all beautiful forms, but they belong to a tradition I have studied and not one I was raised in. My yogic studies have taught and changed me in real ways, yet because this is not the philosophy of my upbringing, I don't always feel the same emotional pull toward its specific forms and stories as those in which I was raised.  And still, the concept of Shakti is one I have enjoyed exploring as an energy, through embodiment practices, and in my personal experience of my own feminine.

 

So here, she takes none of her traditional forms. Instead, I have imagined her within the flow of a cosmic river of energy, formless and in motion, with a face of cosmic aliveness briefly emerging.

 

The face is the most recognizable of all human forms, so recognizable that the mind will construct one from almost nothing: any time we see two shapes above a third, our minds automatically read it as a face. A region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus is dedicated specifically to face processing, and faces are among the most socially essential stimuli we process.

 

So the face that surfaces here belongs to no particular tradition. It is simply a face of cosmic aliveness, rising briefly from the formless before returning to the river of energy. In that rising and returning, it reflects the way Shakti herself moves between what is boundless and what is embodied, between the universal current and the one personal, human face we cannot help but search for within it.