Between Heaven and Earth

In creating "Between Heaven and Earth," I found myself drawn to that liminal space where the sacred and earthly converge—a realm the masters of Ukiyo-e understood intimately as the "floating world." This piece, central to my "Between Two Worlds" collection, explores how we navigate the eternal tension between our spiritual yearnings and rooted existence. The torii gate stands as threshold rather than destination—a passage eternally crossed yet never fully traversed, with Mount Fuji rendered softer and more ethereal than Hokusai might have imagined, transformed by memory and longing into something dreamlike. The garden pulses with life: white lilies reaching skyward like prayers, their pure forms echoing our spiritual aspirations, while the lush undergrowth speaks to our complex, tangled humanity. The flamingo, unexpected in this Japanese-inspired landscape, represents the foreign within the familiar—how we carry pieces of distant places within our most sacred spaces, both intruder and inhabitant, like all of us searching for belonging. Borrowing Ukiyo-e's flattened perspective and bold composition but infusing it with contemporary restlessness, the autumn trees frame the scene with changing colors, reminding us that transcendence is temporary, that the floating world is indeed floating—neither fully grasped nor entirely released. This work asks: where do we find ourselves when caught between the heaven we imagine and the earth we inhabit? Perhaps the sacred has always been here, waiting not beyond the torii but within the very act of approaching it, in that eternal present where longing and fulfillment dance together, never quite touching, never quite apart.