Theia and Her Secret Faces
Painting I of V · Threshold: Identity Acrylic, metallic acrylics and metal leaf on canvas · 120 × 120 cm · 2025
One of five. Becoming One — Journey of Recognition is a penthalogy 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. It changes for you, and not for the next person who looks. No two encounters are the same.
Theia, the Titaness from whom all light proceeds, was almost erased from memory. She returns not as one element but as many faces at once — the cycle's first question: who am I, when I am no longer what others needed me to be? Poem written at the easel: Who am I.
Poem:
Who am I
I am watering life, clenching thirst
Flowing, reaching out, unchained
Should I feel guilty, looks at first
Being flood, then for being contained
Am I water?
If I get wild
I am a hurricane
But if I am mild
I am too weak, everyone is to suffocate
Am I air?
If my flame is too strong
Disaster, I am not trained
Do I not burn, all is wrong
It is cold, should I be ashamed
Am I fire?
Earth once stirs air into fire, pours rain for water
It is the way it goes
Earth accepts a mountain
Its shape, it grows
Who am I?
My fire always will be hot
My water can kill a flame
My breeze once whispers love, then not
I no longer feel a shame
I no longer accept words
Of others, in my head
Over years, felt like swords
While a shadow spread
I am a woman
Not just the one to blame
I am unique
Not ever the same
I am woman
Not only one, I am many
I accept a star
Although I will never understand
She is so close, but seems far
Star shines on a hollow land
What is Earth, without the light
We do not mend, do not stand
I respect all parts of Earth
I accept all pieces of me
My past, my current and the dream
I create now being free
I am so beautiful
I raised from ashes of a star
Feeling the light within self
I am not ever far
I feel my power, I dare to trust
I believe in all stars, I want, not that I must
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/theia/
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
