Vulnerability

Vulnerability is the emotion that refuses to be silent when the world demands it.

When Marvin Gaye released What’s Going On in 1971, Motown tried to stop him. The label considered it uncommercial, too political, too exposed. Gaye released it anyway. A deeply personal album born from the grief of losing a close friend in the Vietnam War, from watching American cities fracture along racial lines, from the exhaustion of a nation consuming itself. “What’s going on” was not a question of confusion. It was a question of conscience. The kind only someone willing to be fully seen could ask.

That willingness is the heart of this painting.

Vulnerability is not weakness. It is the profound courage required to stand in uncertainty, in risk, in emotional exposure, and remain open anyway. It is the refusal to armor oneself at the expense of truth. Gaye understood this more than most. In a musical landscape that rewarded polish and performance, he offered rawness, a man on record asking the hardest questions about love, war, and what it means to be human in a broken world.

The symbols etched into the rock-like formations of this work transcribe fragments of his lyrics as testimony made permanent words carved into stone by a man who did not survive the full arc of his own becoming. Gaye’s death in April 1984, the day before his 45th birthday, at the hands of his own father, is among the most devastating endings in American music. And yet What’s Going On remains, its vulnerability intact, its questions still unanswered.

This piece asks: What are you unwilling to say out loud? And what might open if you did?