Arise and Walk, Strongly and Fearlessly
'Arise and Walk, Strongly and Fearlessly' depicts my wife, Katie, and me standing together amid the waves of grief. Our hands meet at the centre of the drawing, creating a point of contact within a shifting and unstable landscape. I wanted the image to hold the weight of shared grief, while also carrying the quiet strength that has kept us beside one another.
The work is drawn on pages from Havelock Ellis’s The Art of Life. Fragments of language around life, love, philosophy and art remain visible beneath the blue ink. The drawing sits directly on a text concerned with how life is lived, while the figures stand within a reality that has been permanently changed.
The water beneath us rises, folds and pulls around the figures, suggesting the instability of grief and the feeling of having to find balance within something much larger than oneself. The bodies remain upright, joined by touch.
Above us, a monarch butterfly hovers in the open space. I was drawn to the monarch because of its association with transformation, passage and fragile endurance. Its migration holds something both delicate and immense, a small body crossing impossible distances. Within this drawing, it carries a sense of the soul, of movement between states, and of beauty appearing in the middle of devastation without softening what has been lost.
The rose in my hand has not fully opened. It carries the tenderness of a life interrupted before its bloom. It sits in the image as something loved, held and unfinished.
This is one of the most important works in the ‘Black & Blue’ series for me. It holds Katie’s strength, our shared pain, and the bond that has fortified between us. The title reads like something spoken to the body when meaning begins to fail; arise and walk, strongly and fearlessly.
Ballpoint pen on collaged pages from Havelock Ellis’s The Art of Life (1929)
59 x 84 cm2026