Artist statement

The Book of the Heart was made during a period of compounding grief — personal loss colliding with bearing witness to the massacre of children in Gaza. Their emaciated bodies pulled from the rubble. Their faces filling my screen. So many dead children.

I painted daily. Painting was the structure that kept me upright. It gave me something to hold onto when nothing else made sense.

I turned to the Japanese language's vocabulary for grief and spirits — yūrei, ikiryō, onryō — words for presences that linger, that resist closure, that refuse to disappear. These weren't metaphors. They were what I was living: ghosts that wouldn't leave, grief that wouldn't resolve, a sense that the dead were still close, still demanding something.

The biomorphic figures I call "the sprites" emerged through spontaneous action painting — brushes, brayers, free association, music driving the motion. I worked in a trance, sometimes for hours, compulsive and exhausting, the act of painting becoming both anesthetic and ritual. The marks are traces of those states: strain, repetition, endurance, return.

Grief rewires you. It alters perception, memory, the body. It isolates you from people who haven't experienced it and binds you to those who have — including the dead. These paintings are what that looked like: wild, restless, urgent, repetitive. Not illustrating grief but enacting it, over and over, until something shifted.

I made forty-seven paintings in nine months. It was all that mattered.

Macaulay Woods- January 2026