Struggle Life (Circular Narratives) Mixed Media Contemporary Painting

This suite of circular panels stages memory as an orbiting archive: stark, monochrome portraits are pinned like evidentiary fragments at the center, while a perimeter of hand-drawn motifs—tools, flora, domestic diagrams, and small notations—circulates as the lived context that words can’t quite hold. The tension between the photograph’s fixed gaze and the sketch’s restless, wandering line creates a quiet choreography of presence and absence, as if each sitter is surrounded by the objects and stories that shaped them but could never be fully contained. The repeated round format reads like a series of moons or shields, elevating everyday biography into a ritual of keeping—an intimate taxonomy where personal history becomes both specimen and talisman.