The Answer: Lillian Verkins

The artist has the Answer deep inside her.
It glows like a beacon calling out to others on the journey.
It revealed itself to her over a multitude of lifetimes, consciousness being passed onto the next life, the artist repeatedly being born anew.
She sought the truth, was open to it and was rewarded with both the glory of its presence and an obligation—that the artist not keep the Answer to herself.

Teatrix Fading Away in the Light, acrylic on canvas

She paints the stars and she paints beyond the stars, beyond and farther and deeper still than anything seen by human eyes.
She paints the universe in all its majestic colors, twisting and contorting and ever evolving.
What seems like science from a distance is pure magic up close.
She pushes and pulls the paint on the canvas until the colors feel right.
When they are, it is as if the sky has been torn open, a rip across the heavens, time, space, and everything that has ever been known.
This is not disaster. This is not the end.
This is birth and life and the beginning.

In tearing the sky asunder, the artist reveals a glimpse of the Answer.
It was hidden in plain sight, waiting to be revealed, hoping to make contact.
With every painting, more and more is exposed. She births each canvas, giving it a new life and a fresh start and a freedom to achieve its true purpose.
Yes, even the canvas has a purpose.
The artist paints as though her life depends upon it, because it does.
Ours do, too.

She paints with purpose knowing that without the Answer, all will be lost.
It is a desperate attempt to save humanity through paint on canvas, through truth in art.
The artist’s mission is clear. She is noble and determined.
She paints so that we can be more, more than we are, more than we thought we could be.
The artist is our conduit to the truth. She guides us ever closer to the Answer.

And the Answer is this…
That we are all one.
On a spiritual level, on a molecular level, we are all one.

Big Bang Theory in B & W, acrylic on canvas

It is an interconnectedness that cannot be unbroken, a thread that cannot be undone.
It goes beyond genus and species and family.
It is the very science of life itself.
It is a symbiosis of the highest level. We simply cannot exist without each other.

We are all made from the same star stuff, gasses and atoms and particles that evolved over a hundred million millennia.
These elements converged on our too-small planet and together they formed one extensive, expansive, and extravagant organism composed of nearly eight billion beings.

It is a beauty and a wonder when we realize this.
It is a terror and a shame when we do not.

The artist continues her mission.
She keeps painting. She keeps creating.
She keeps revealing the depths and the mysteries and the truths of the universe.
She continues to peel back the layers by applying more paint to canvas, and in so doing the Answer becomes clear.
That the truth and the universe are one and the same.
That we are all parts of the same creature, simultaneously living inside of and made up of cosmic components.
It is simple and complex all at once.
It is a comfort and a warning.
It is what we search for and what we avoid.
It is our hope and our despair.
It is a paradox.