The Story Behind Unframed

Unframed started with a simple question: what happens when the boundaries around us begin to loosen?

I was interested in the difference between looking free and actually feeling free. We can step away from something and still carry its shape with us. Sometimes the line has already disappeared, but we continue to live as though it is there.

That thought became a series of ten female portraits. Across the paintings, a frame appears, breaks, opens and eventually almost disappears. The faces change with it. Some are tense and exposed. Others turn inward. Later, they begin to lift their gaze.

Why I called it Unframed

The frame in these paintings is not simply a shape in the background. It represents the expectations, fears and habits that can define the limits of a life. Some of those limits come from other people. Others are ones we slowly build for ourselves.

Breaking them is rarely one clean, dramatic act. More often, it happens quietly. You question something you once accepted. You stop trying to fit into a role that no longer feels right. You make one different choice, then another.

I did not want to paint freedom as a single triumphant pose. It felt more honest to show the parts that come before it as well: the tension, the withdrawal, the uncertainty and the small moment when you finally begin to look up.

It begins with tension

Untethered and Untamed open the series. Neither painting is calm.

In Untethered, her head is thrown back, her throat exposed and her eyes closed. Red and orange take over the canvas around her. The frame is barely there, more like the memory of an edge she has already started to move past.

Untamed faces you directly. Her hair cuts across her face, the marks are rough and unsettled, but her gaze does not move. There is still pressure around her, but there is also refusal. She is no longer asking permission.

Turning inward

The next three paintings are quieter: Poise, Peace and Softening.

This part of the series mattered to me because change is often mistaken for constant movement. Sometimes the real shift happens when everything goes still.

In Poise, the figure turns fully into profile with her eyes closed. Peace sits inside a field of red, with petals covering her eyes. It is not a soft, pastel version of peace. It is the kind you find while the noise is still there. In Softening, a gold rectangle almost surrounds the figure, but it never quite closes. Colour has already begun to bleed past it.

These paintings are not about giving up. They are about no longer fighting every feeling long enough to understand what it is asking for.

The point where the gaze lifts

Hope sits alone at the centre of the series.

Her chin is lifted, with her hair moving across her face. She seems to be looking toward something outside the painting, even though she cannot see it clearly yet.

Hope is not certainty. It is simply the first moment when another possibility becomes visible. That is why this painting acts as the pivot. The earlier works look inward or hold their ground. From here, the figures begin to face forward.

Arrival is quieter than expected

Grace, Resolve and Solace hold the arrival stage. There is less struggle in them, but they are not empty of feeling.

Grace is still and unhurried. Warm colour and cool blue meet behind her, but she no longer needs them to resolve. Resolve lifts her chin toward the horizon, composed and facing forward. Solace rests low in a wide, quiet landscape, no longer trying to push through anything.

What interested me here was the absence of performance. None of these figures need to prove they are free. They have simply stopped arranging themselves around the boundary.

Why Bloom had to come last

Bloom closes the series. Her face is lifted into full colour: yellow, orange, green and warm red. Her hair is loose and nothing is held back.

It is the only painting in the series without charcoal underneath. That difference mattered. Charcoal had given the earlier faces their structure, but it also carried the marks of tension and revision. In Bloom, colour is enough. The structure has not been destroyed. It is simply no longer controlling the figure.

What the series means to me now

Looking at all ten works together, I do not see a neat line from struggle to happiness. Real life does not work that way. I see ten states that we move between at different times.

That is why I wanted every painting to stand on its own. One person may recognise themselves in the directness of Untamed. Someone else may need the quiet of Solace, or the first upward glance in Hope.

The series is complete, but its central question is one I keep returning to in my work: how much of the frame around us is real, and how much of it have we simply learned not to cross?

View the complete Unframed Series