Veins of Porcelain: The Gravity of Winged Fire

Veins of Porcelain: The Gravity of Winged Fire reinterprets Jackson Pollock’s  Reflection of the Big Dipper as a celestial rite of passage—where the cosmos is not viewed from a distance but felt through the veins of the body, splashed in shadow, light, and rebirth. In this reinterpretation, Pollock’s wild energy collapses into myth and metamorphosis. His starlit abstraction becomes the skin of a creature in mid-transformation—where wings erupt from thought, and constellations bleed through bone. The canvas itself is not a field—it is a chrysalis of fire and flight. 

The central figure is not fully human, not entirely formed. Half-seen through the black loops of Pollock’s original linework, a shadowed, gestural body presses forward in a dance of emergence. One leg curls beneath, one arm lifts as if caught in surrender or awakening, and the head tilts back into the cosmos—mouth open as if drinking in light. The body is not painted but webbed—wrapped in the pulsing net of Pollock’s chaos, his signature splatters layered like stardust, like sinew, like strands of divine gravity binding soul to sky. 

Around this cocooned form, wings explode. On the upper left, soft crimson butterflies flutter into the edge of the frame, their fragile bodies drifting toward light. On the right, larger feathered arcs—creamy whites tinged with orange flame—burst through the mist, hinting at both angels and ash. This juxtaposition of fragility and power, of insect and spirit, becomes a core tension: is this figure dying or ascending? Is this the final breath, or the first one remembered? 

Pollock’s color is alive and purposeful here. His original palette, often seen as volatile, now reads as elemental code: the deep blacks form celestial scaffolding, constellations inked in urgency. The splashes of yellow are no longer light—they are echo, vibration, pulse. Ochres and white-gray flashes burn across the core like solar flares, illuminating not a star map, but the flicker of memory through flesh. There are hints of amethyst within the chaos—soft lilac flickers swallowed by smoke—that suggest the spiritual, the quiet voice under the scream. 

The background is neither night nor day. Instead, it is the moment between—a soft aurora of mist, gold, and vapor. The atmosphere bleeds in gentle gradients: dusty mauve, the lavender of dusk, and an almost translucent pearl, as if the entire piece is held within a whisper or a breath. This ambiguity of time and space is central. The figure isn’t in the universe—it is the reflection of it, curved through the lens of becoming. 

As an artist, my thought when reimagining this piece was rooted in resurrection—not as drama, but as quiet defiance. Pollock’s  Reflection of the Big Dipper always suggested an echo of something larger, a mirror rippling in unseen water. Here, I wanted that reflection to break free—to become its own origin. The Big Dipper, a symbol of navigation, memory, and orientation, now reflects not in a pool, but in a body. It moves not above, but through us. 

The gesture of the rising body, tangled in paint and shadow, is deeply personal. It speaks of survival through fragmentation, of grace emerging from disarray. It speaks of moments when we feel unrecognizable even to ourselves—but find that within the blur, there is still direction, still light. The wings are not a fantasy. They are the physicalization of grief, the anatomy of every silent victory. 

Veins of Porcelain: The Gravity of Winged Fire is not a cosmic painting. It is an intimate one. It draws the sky into the chest and asks: what if the constellations are not above us, but inside us? What if the chaos we fear is the very scaffolding of flight? It is a painting of becoming, of bursting open, of knowing that even in a world stitched together by storms, there is still the possibility of softness, and fire, and wings.