Apocalypse Reborn

Even after the end, something always finds a way to grow.

Apocalypse Reborn began as one of my earliest experiments with heavy texture, long before I fully understood the materials I was using. I had covered the canvas with wall spackle, not yet knowing how important the drying & sealing process would be if I wanted the piece to survive. When the texture began to fail, I took one of my tools & started scraping it away, intending to remove it. Instead, I uncovered something I loved. Layers of the base color began showing through the broken surface, creating the appearance of old walls crumbling, weathered, & slowly being reclaimed by time.

It immediately took me back to the first time I hiked through the Chickamauga Battlefield in GA. I remember seeing the old structures & imagining all they had witnessed during the Civil War; the wounded & fallen men of the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, the lives forever changed there, & the history still held within that ground. Now, more than a century & a half later, those weathered remnants sit surrounded by a world that never stopped growing. Vines climb over what remains. Moss softens broken surfaces. Trees, roots, & earth slowly reclaim the places where so much history once unfolded. There was something haunting about it, but also incredibly beautiful.

Inspired by that memory, I gathered small twigs from the place I loved to hike & brought them home, laying them into the piece as though nature itself were growing through the ruins. I added abstract circles representing the sun & the moon, constant witnesses to what comes, what disappears, & what begins again.

I photographed the finished piece as a memory, & then I threw it away. I knew I hadn't created it in a way that could be properly preserved, & at the time, I believed that was the end of its story. Years later, it turns out I was wrong.

Now that Amy Ashlyn Art is officially offering fine art prints of original paintings, this early piece has found its way back to life. There is something beautifully ironic about an artwork inspired by nature reclaiming what was broken, being reclaimed itself.

Now available as a print or a print on canvas.