Veins of Porcelain: The Arithmetic of Disappearing Selves

Veins of Porcelain: The Arithmetic of Disappearing Selves reframes Jackson Pollock’s  There Were Seven in Eight as an exploration of fragmented identity—where multiple personas dissolve into one another within a cerebral tangle of instinct, line, and memory. This reinterpretation transforms Pollock’s original abstract fury into the anatomy of a dream collapsing, as if every version of a self, every mask worn and removed, has gathered in one moment of existential reckoning beneath the threshold of consciousness. 

At the heart of the composition lies the ghosted visage of a woman—her face calm, almost sacred, rendered in soft earth tones and finely contoured shadows. Her features are formed from fragments: pieces of sketch, curves of Cubist abstraction, and fragments of anatomical mapping. Lines intersect her face like memory scars—part geometric, part organic—suggesting a persona that has been not drawn, but built across many years and lost timelines. Her gaze is inward, unfocused, as if trying to recognize herself beneath the weight of everything she’s ever been told to become. 

Above her brow surges the Pollock eruption. His furious abstraction forms the storm cloud of her inner world—an electrified, chaotic cortex of thought and feeling. Reds crash against ochres and charcoals; yellows scream through dark, wiry clusters of tangled black. Pollock’s lines do not merely hover—they descend, they pierce. The entire storm seems to collapse onto the skull of the figure, turning her into both altar and battleground. 

The number in Pollock’s title—“seven in eight”—is echoed here not as a numerical truth but as a psychological metaphor. There are seven versions of the self compressed into the eighth—the visible one. This single face is the summation, the visible residue of multiplicity held tightly under pressure. The rest—those other six or seven selves—are buried in the noise, hinted at through the echoes of abstract forms beneath her jawline, behind her ears, along her fractured neckline. 

The color palette is a measured paradox. The face glows with a warmth drawn from ochre, muted rose, and soft sienna—tones that evoke skin, breath, and quiet contemplation. Around her edges, a desaturated mustard haze blends into translucent gray, softening the transition between face and background. Over this quiet foundation erupts Pollock’s palette: visceral crimsons, scorched blacks, deep purples, and neurotic yellows. These colors bleed and wrestle with one another, each line like a voice interrupting another. 

As an artist, my thoughts while reshaping this vision revolved around the mathematical breakdown of identity. Pollock’s  There Were Seven in Eight always suggested, to me, the impossibility of singularity—that no person is ever just one, but rather a multiplicity blurred into coherence. In this piece, I wanted to visualize the invisible violence of holding all those selves together. The calmness of the woman’s face is not peace—it is endurance. It is the fragile equilibrium that forms when contradiction is accepted but not yet resolved. 

The abstraction above her is not separate from her—it is her. Her thoughts are not organized into language, but rather into gesture, color, and rupture. Every drip is a broken sentence. Every swirl is a memory she doesn’t have words for. She is not thinking. She is containing. She is the eighth. 

The overlay of line drawings throughout her face recalls technical diagrams and anatomical studies. There is something surgical, even scientific, about the way her face is dissected. This was intentional—a gesture toward how society often attempts to analyze, reduce, and define what it cannot understand. Her femininity is simultaneously mythologized and deconstructed; she is sacred and anatomical, symbolic and specific. 

In  Veins of Porcelain: The Arithmetic of Disappearing Selves , I wanted the viewer to experience dissonance not as confusion, but as honesty. This is not a portrait of a woman. It is a portrait of the space between who we are and who we are allowed to be—between the outer image and the inner architecture. It is a meditation on the cost of holding ourselves together when we are composed of so many scattered parts.