Harnessing the Eclipse explores what happens when a person stops resisting the darker passages of life and begins to recognize them as thresholds—periods in which identity, certainty, and familiar ways of seeing are temporarily obscured so something deeper can emerge.
The eclipse is the central force within the work. It represents those rare moments when darkness moves directly across the source of light: grief over joy, fear over certainty, loss over identity, or transformation over everything that once felt stable. An eclipse can feel absolute while it is happening, yet by its nature it is temporary. The light has not vanished; it has simply been hidden from view. That becomes a metaphor for the periods in our lives when we can no longer access the person we once were, yet have not fully become the person we are moving toward.
Its intense red illumination changes the meaning of the darkness. Red carries associations with blood, life force, desire, danger, courage, passion, and rebirth. Rather than presenting the eclipse as something cold or empty, the work gives it heat—as though the darkness itself has become charged with energy. Transformation here is not passive. It asks something of us.
Below it sits the crimson-robed figure, positioned between the celestial event and the restless sea. Her identity is hidden beneath the fabric, removing the distractions of age, expression, or individual biography. She becomes almost archetypal: a figure occupying the space between what can be seen and what must be felt.
The robe functions as both protection and power. It surrounds the body like a boundary, suggesting that transformation does not require complete exposure. There are seasons in which the self must turn inward, become less visible, and protect what is still forming. The crimson fabric also mirrors the eclipse above, visually connecting the woman to the force she is witnessing. She is not separate from the transformation occurring in the sky. Something within her is undergoing the same process.
Yet she does not raise her hands toward the eclipse or attempt to control it.
Instead, she holds a much smaller sphere of light.
That contrast is essential to the work.
The eclipse is enormous, distant, and beyond her control. The orb is intimate enough to rest in her palm. It represents intuition, consciousness, inner truth, and the part of the self that remains accessible when external circumstances become impossible to command. The figure cannot determine what happens in the sky, but she can choose what she carries through it.
The orb may also be understood as the unextinguished self—the fragment of clarity that survives periods when identity feels eclipsed. It is not large enough to illuminate the entire world around her, and it does not need to be. Its power comes from proximity. She can hold it. She can protect it. She can follow it.
Behind her, the ocean becomes the emotional and subconscious landscape of the piece. Its waves are unsettled, continually arriving and withdrawing, echoing the way grief, memory, longing, fear, and desire rarely move in straight lines. Emotional transformation is tidal. We believe something has passed, only to feel it return differently.
The woman does not stand above the water or attempt to silence it. She sits beside it.
That stillness matters.
There is power in witnessing emotion without needing to immediately conquer it. The sea remains turbulent, yet the figure remains grounded enough to hold light in its presence. The work suggests that strength is not always the absence of emotional movement. Sometimes strength is the ability to remain connected to oneself while that movement continues.
The rocky shoreline forms the boundary between land and water, consciousness and subconscious, stability and uncertainty. It is a liminal place—neither completely one world nor the other. The figure occupies precisely that threshold. She has not retreated from the sea, yet she has not disappeared into it.
This tension between forces repeats throughout the composition: light and shadow, stillness and movement, concealment and illumination, cosmic power and personal power. The work does not attempt to resolve those opposites. Instead, it allows them to coexist.
That is ultimately what it means to harness the eclipse.
It is not controlling darkness or pretending it does not exist. It is recognizing that shadow can reveal what constant light sometimes hides. It is learning that uncertainty can strip away false certainty, that endings can expose attachment, and that periods of obscurity can return us to the smallest and most essential truths we carry within ourselves.
Harnessing the Eclipse is ultimately about learning to stand inside moments of darkness without surrendering personal power.
