Pass On

Title: Pass On
Dimensions: 58 x 80 cm    
Medium: Charcoal On Ivory Paper    
Style: Surrealism    
Year: 2026    
Characteristic: Unique Selling Proposition, Certificate of Authenticity, Unframed

Meaning:

"Pass On" explores the profound and often unacknowledged asymmetry between those who give and those who receive—between sacrifice and entitlement, effort and expectation.

At the center of the composition, a bald eagle ascends mid-flight, wings fully outstretched, caught in a luminous vortex of swirling light and smoke. The eagle is a timeless symbol of power, wisdom, and sovereignty—representing the gifts humanity most desires: wealth, knowledge, strength, and divine favour. Two pairs of hands frame the scene, and it is in their contrast that the true narrative lives.

The lower hands bear the full weight of the work. Scarred, wounded, and marked by a dark cracked void at the center of one palm, they reach upward with effort and intention—offering everything they carry. The wound is not incidental; it is the cost of giving. These are the hands of those who pour out wisdom, wealth, and power at great personal expense, labouring in ways the world rarely witnesses or acknowledges.

The upper hand, by contrast, descends from the darkness with ease—open, relaxed, and unmarked. It receives without strain, without sacrifice, without evidence of effort made. The glowing light near its fingertips is not something it has earned, but something that simply arrives. This is the hand of the receiver: reaching not from hunger or striving, but from a passive expectation that what is valuable will come.

The swirling luminescence binding both hands and the eagle represents the threshold of legacy—the fleeting, almost spiritual moment in which something precious passes from one life into another. Yet the tragedy embedded in the image is one of timing. Receivers often come to understand the true magnitude of what they have been given only after the givers have disappeared—when the scarred hands that labored are no longer there to be thanked.

The eagle, soaring freely between them, belongs to neither. It is the gift in motion—indifferent to the pain that released it, and blind to the hand that now holds it.

This is a meditation on sacrifice, invisibility, and the painful human tendency to recognize the value of devotion only in its absence.