Reckoning with the Unconscious #3

Watercolor on 9" x 12" coldpress paper
Original (one-of-a-kind)
Signed on front
Ready to frame

Some inheritances arrive in silence, others with eyes that never look away. In this portrait, the elder carries more than his own life—within him rises a tree, a living record of all that has held him steady.

Beside him waits the jaguar. Not decoration, but kin. Its presence leans close, a reminder that instinct is never lost, that the wild watches over us long after we’ve forgotten how to name it. The jaguar does not follow; it stands guard. It does not speak – it listens. In its gaze is a promise: that we are never wholly alone in carrying what has been entrusted to us.

This piece continues the series on emergence, ancestry, and the unseen companions that walk with us. Each portrait reveals a different way memory survives, through the body, through rupture, and here, through the quiet guardianship of animal intelligence.