Aphrodite emerged not from love but from violence — and rises from the foam not to seduce but to create. The largest canvas in the cycle: the decisive shift from object to author of desire, a kingdom built by living, not surviving. Poem written at the easel: Queen of the Seas.
One of five. Becoming One — Journey of Recognition is a pentalogy that, unplanned, maps a complete arc of Jungian individuation: the descent into shadow and the slow ascent into wholeness. Five goddesses each take the first-person voice across five thresholds — identity, desire, balance, choice, joy. Each canvas is mixed with metallic pigment, so its colour changes under different light — the painting you meet at dawn is not the one you meet at midnight.
QUEEN OF THE SEAS
Poem:
I am the queen of the seas
Not all of them, just the ones
Painted
With my brushes
Waves are mine
Water flows, heals while crushes
Orders of all those scientists
From morning till morning
I don't lose my breath
Never alone, aborning
Sea moss, my bed
Not death
I am full, never alone
There's no one sleepless night
I was born, on a wake of the morning
Found myself, eyes wide and bright
I create peace
By the whisper of the breeze
In the foam
Of my sea waves
Recovered by love
Away from the court of saints
Light blue, dark blue during storm
For others, full of stains
I am water entwined with colors
I flow, in the rhythm of nature
I am not perishing
I do not survive
I create a kingdom
By living and opening
Gates to freedom
I call, welcome
All mermaids
And Poseidons of the other seas
From the heat of judgment
In sorrow and loneliness
What if they burn
From the sea to the ocean
Water I call
Trust I hope to earn
Like a fool
Understanding the incomprehensible
I am the queen of the seas
The water is blue
Painting, in the moonlight
With my brushes
The poem is given voice as a song. The painting can be experienced under changing chromatic light at journey.sentienttopaint.art — catalogue: canva.link/journey-looking2seeing
https://sentienttopaint.art/becoming-one/sophrosyne/
DECLARATION:
I, Simona Ray, declare the following about every work in this submission, because my work is about honest seeing - and that must include how my work itself is made.
All paintings are physical canvases, painted by my hand. The colour you see shifting across each of them is not a digital filter but video of the canvases under different colored lights: I mix metallic acrylic colours directly into the paint, so the surface answers to real light - the painting at dawn is not the painting at midnight. Every photograph of the canvases documents them as they physically are, captured under real conditions.
The poems were written by me, at the easel, in the same moment as the brushwork. They appear verbatim - on the site, in the songs, and beside the paintings. The music on the site and inside Journey began as those poems and as melodies that arrived while I painted. To turn them into finished recordings, I used an AI music application to assist in the music creation: I provided my poems for the lyrics word-for-word and mastered the songs based on my melodic and stylistic direction, to reflect what I felt and heard while at the easel. The voices in these recordings are AI-rendered; the words, the intention, and every decision of what exists and what was deleted are mine. I hold the commercial rights to these recordings, and I disclose their how they were made here in full. They are a reflection of me.
The website and browser work were conceived, designed, and creatively directed entirely by me. The code was built and implemented with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) as a software developer and technical advisor and fully based on my creative direction: every word, image, poem, sound, and structural idea is my own.
Beyond what is disclosed above, no third-party intellectual property has been incorporated into this submission, and no artificial intelligence was used in the creation of the paintings, the poems, videos, or the photographs.
I hand you my inner world - not because it is finished, but because it is honest and it is time to be shared!
Simona Ray · July 2026
