Veins of Porcelain: The Immersion of Fractured Breath

Veins of Porcelain: The Immersion of Fractured Breath submerges Jackson Pollock’s  Full Fathom Five into a turbulent dreamscape where the boundaries between drowning and awakening blur into a single, gasping moment. In this conceptual resurrection, the ocean is not simply a body of water but a living consciousness—an overwhelming force that drags memory, desire, and forgotten identities into its fathomless depths.  

At the core of this composition, a human face surfaces through a violent vortex, the lips parted in a fragile surrender, suspended between the final breath of resistance and the silent acceptance of oblivion. The water above is rendered in a spiraling gyre of sapphire and obsidian, its swirling currents encircling the figure like liquid arms. Each ripple twists with emotional gravity, drawing the viewer closer to the raw sensation of being swallowed whole by the unseen forces of the subconscious.  

Beneath this drowning figure, Pollock’s chaotic energy erupts in a violent tapestry of raw texture and impossible colors. Blades of searing white slash through molten streaks of vermillion and volcanic orange, their jagged forms like shattered memories ripping through the still surface of composure. These strokes become the very heartbeat of the scene—each line a pulse of fear, each color a burning reminder of emotions buried too deep and for too long.  

Along the left edge, a fissure of glowing crimson fractures the darkness like the cracking of an ancient vessel under impossible pressure. This blazing rupture symbolizes the inevitable release—the point where containment fails, and the buried rises unbidden to the surface. Thin streams of molten gold trace the break, as if the fracture itself is both a wound and a path to some higher, untamed truth.  

In the lower canvas, a second face emerges—half consumed by mist, half sculpted from shadow. Her lips are parted as if exhaling her final confession into the churning abyss, her eyes unseen beneath the soft, drowning folds of smoky grey. This spectral visage represents the echo of the self left behind, the version of the soul that cannot follow through the deep descent. She is both the anchor and the ghost, lingering at the edge of a transformation she cannot complete.  

The color language here speaks in elemental dialects. The upper vortex trembles with the cold detachment of deep ocean blues and glacial teals, layered with the sharp brilliance of fractured ice. These cool tones crash violently against the eruptive energy of Pollock’s signature chaos—explosions of burnt orange, flaring scarlet, and raw white cutting through the darkness like heat lightning across a storm-laden sea. Deep violet shadows fold gently into the corners, their velvety gloom offering the only softness in a world otherwise dominated by collapse and violent renewal.  

As an artist, my thoughts while creating this were drawn to the delicate moment between holding on and letting go—the final breath before the plunge, the last moment of clarity before the self is scattered among the unknown. In Pollock’s  Full Fathom Five , every embedded object, every drip and collision becomes a sunken relic of some inner shipwreck. Here, I sought to visualize that wreckage as a living storm, as the very fabric of transformation itself.  

The immersion is both death and baptism—an obliteration of the old self and a terrifying promise of rebirth. The faces that rise and fall through these waters are not separate entities but phases of the same consciousness caught in the cyclical violence of surrender.  

In  Veins of Porcelain: The Immersion of Fractured Breath , I invite the viewer to stand on the brink of their own emotional depths, to feel the cold pull of what lies beneath, and to choose: fight against the current or fall willingly into the ocean’s eternal embrace.