Awakenings is a 30" x 48" painting in acryIic paint and oil pastel. I sketched in the structure of this painting a few weeks prior to the pandemic but couldn’t figure out how to complete it. Over the next weeks, I painstakingly added underlying colors but was still stalled. Then, after the BLM protests started boiling over, I allowed it to be whatever it wanted, and the deep, dark blues and greens appeared. Purples and reds layered in long strokes and flurries of contrasting twists and swirls.