Helena Blavatsky
from Genomic
30" x 36"
acrylic on canvas
2022

The final canvas in the Genomic Works sequence, Helena Blavatsky returns to a visual language built for non-linear thought. Created in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the work channels personal unrest into symbolic architecture. Each bar is a fragment—emotional, historical, philosophical.


It opens with the Tarot card Judgement over a field of black and grey handprints. The card signals endings and beginnings; the handprints mark the human cost. A blank gray bar follows—loss, erasure, destruction. Then, Chinese calligraphy from Jiang Shijie’s 17th-century poem overlays scrolling lines, evoking fond memories fractured by upheaval.


The fourth bar repeats, blurs, resists clarity. The fifth—largest and most direct—is the portrait bar. A woman rendered in Soviet red stares outward, intense and unresolved. She is not Blavatsky, but a proxy. Blavatsky was born in Russia; her birthplace is now Dnipro, Ukraine. The portrait becomes a hinge between histories.


Topographical lines follow—land as concept, not truth. Then a blended DNA bar: shared, unique, unresolved. The eighth bar shows barren branches, or arteries—nature echoing body, echoing land. The ninth is a loose bar: green dots dissolving the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. A disruption. An anomaly.


The final bar is luminous—swirling patterns of growth and design. It signals the power of thought and reason to resist chaos. To make meaning where none is given.


Helena Blavatsky confronts the genomic system.  A canvas of rupture, memory, and philosophical recursion—where each bar must be weighed, and each meaning must be made anew.