Storms Beneath the Skin: Painting the Body, Womanhood, and Creation

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The Storm Within, 2026, Acrylic, oil paint and oil stick on canvas, 30 × 40 cm

I made this painting recently, and while looking at it again I realised how bodily it felt — almost womb-like. Womanhood in colour and movement. Perhaps the body sometimes knows before the mind does.

Art that comes from the body often reaches back into it. That’s not weakness — that’s where its power is.

This painting began as a physical act. I covered a previous canvas with white acrylic, a painting I had been stuck on and unhappy with for months. Over that blank surface I began working with oil paint and oil stick, not with brushes but with my fingers while wearing gloves.

At one point the glove tore and the oil paint slipped beneath my nails, staining them deep red with a hint of blue. I remember looking down at my hands and thinking how strangely beautiful it felt — colour sitting under the skin like something elemental. Weeks later my nail is still stained with blue.

That blue almost feels invasive. A colour so often coded by society as “masculine,” yet here it exists only as a small presence within the painting — and still it seeped into my body, into my skin and nails, as though claiming space.

The painting that emerged feels intensely bodily to me.

The palette moves through crimson, rose, mauve and deep brown — colours that feel almost internal, like flesh, blood, or the interior darkness of the womb. At the centre there is a softness, a pale luminosity surrounded by darker pigments that swirl around it protectively. It reminds me of those cinematic moments where light passes through the body during birth scenes, where life is suggested as something glowing and fragile within shadow.

It feels maternal in a way that is difficult to explain.

Not simply motherhood, but something older: the idea that women have always carried the possibility of life within them. The body as origin.

The fact that the paint was moved by hand matters too. There is something intimate about touching the canvas directly, about feeling the oil drag and smear beneath your fingers. The painting wasn’t constructed at a distance. It was made through contact.

While on a Zoom meeting with poet Nikita Gill — for a project I’ll be sharing more about soon — she noticed the painting behind me and said something that stayed with me:

“It reminds me of standing in a storm.”

I love that description. Storms are powerful, unpredictable, alive. They are not passive things — they reshape landscapes.

Perhaps womanhood can feel like that too: movement, force, creation, endurance.

The painting moves through colours historically tied to the body — blood, skin, flesh, interiority. Yet they also evoke something cosmic: nebulae, clouds, shifting atmospheres. That duality matters — the intimate and the universal at once.

The composition pulls the eye inward. There’s a light, almost glowing centre surrounded by darker pigments that swirl around it. It feels protective, almost uterine. The darker edges could be read as the world pressing in — gravity, history, expectation — while the luminous centre suggests life, potential, creation.

Finger painting is often associated with childhood, but here it becomes something more primal. My hands physically moved the paint like matter — like clay, like flesh. The broken glove and the pigment beneath my nails reinforce the idea of the body making the image. The painting isn’t distant or controlled. It is tactile, embodied.

The small hint of blue remains intriguing to me. Because it is not dominant, it feels like something submerged, quietly breaking through the surface. Blue can suggest calm, depth, distance — even melancholy. Here it interrupts the red field gently, like breath within heat or thought within instinct.

In a painting that feels so bodily, that blue might represent the mind within the body — a reminder that identity, especially female identity, is layered and never singular.

Nothing in the painting is rigid. Everything swirls, presses and dissolves into itself, giving it a sense of movement. That fluidity echoes cycles often culturally associated with femininity — menstruation, pregnancy, birth, renewal.

It feels less like a static image and more like something forming.

To be a woman in the world is complicated. It is powerful and vulnerable, creative and exhausting, celebrated and overlooked all at once.

But it is also the beginning of everything.

Every life begins in the body of a woman. Every history begins there too.

And as I write these words I find myself becoming emotional.

Maybe that is why the painting feels less like an image and more like something alive.

Today, on International Women’s Day, this painting feels like a quiet reminder: the body remembers what the world often forgets.