‘Velvet Claw’
Velvet Claw is a portrait about instinct, intimacy, and emotional duality. The figure doesn’t perform softness for the world; she carries her own shadows like armor, holding a black cat as if the animal were a mirror of her internal world. There is tenderness here, but it has sharp edges.
The collage beneath the oil paint is made of diary fragments, architectural imagery, small symbolic drawings, and gestures that feel like thoughts in motion. Nothing is ornamental. Every layer points to the private rituals that shape identity—the stories we rewrite, the feelings we carry without language, the memories that become part of our emotional architecture.
I think a lot about how femininity is often expected to be gentle, clear, agreeable. Velvet Claw is about rejecting that performance. It’s about how softness can coexist with instinct, tension, sensuality, and self-possession. The cat, the tattoos, the crossed-out marks—they are reminders that comfort and danger can occupy the same body, the same room, the same moment.
This piece exists in the space where mythology meets domestic life: an inner altar made of secrecy, memory, intuition, and the quiet power of being unapologetically oneself.