Commission by  Zyonji.

Painted up by the wonderful Zyonji. Such a pleasant artist to work with. After browsing through some of her recent work, I really felt some connection with what she had been doing with her character portraits. There was some serene quality to them. One portrait in particular gave me this uncanny impression that the character was actually staring at me from within the screen. Maybe I'm just weird XD. But regardless, I knew it would be best if I were to leave the piece up to her creative control, and so I did. After some back and fourth, we began to arrive at a theme for the portrait as Zyonji asked me questions. I shared a time in my life where I was sitting alone in my room while I traveled in northern New Mexico for work.

One winter evening around dusk, a storm began to move in. This snow storm would eventually drop four or five feet of snow on the area, but not before I sat watching it through the window. Outside my room, across one road and one quaint river, was a wall of old growth pines which populated and climbed this nearby mountain by the thousands, all the way to the peak. As the storm blew in and the sun fell below the crest of the valley, the temperature fell below zero. I could feel the dead cold through the window as I sat near it, my fireplace and heaters working with vigor to keep the room warm. Over the course of thirty, or perhaps forty minutes, I watched the wall of pines disappear behind blankets of snow, their delicate branches drooping beneath the weight of their accumulated snow cover. Before long, the sun was completely gone and the clouds still hung thick and heavy in the sky, the wind-whipped snow further masking my view. I could still see the trees in the distance, but they would soon disappear into an oppression of white haze. I sat alone in my room, feeling the harsh cold of the window, and I pondered our modern lives. I considered how helpless I, and everyone else in the town would have been just a hundred years earlier. I thought about the power of nature as it pressed its full will against the trees, the mountains, and everything it wished. This portrait depicts this scene, but lacks all of the anxiety I felt that day. And in hindsight, I am more than happy to look back on these moments of my life, and be able to focus on the positive aspects while allowing the negative aspects to step a little further into the background.