This Journey is built around eight paintings of Greek Goddesses and can be found at https://journey.sentienttopaint.art/
These works do not borrow from mythology. They inhabit it — from the inside. Eight goddesses who spent centuries flattened into symbols, archetypes and moral lessons are returned here to their full complexity. They speak as women. Contradictory, luminous, unresolved, and deeply human.
The foundation of this digital work is based the story behind these goddesses and the artist's extensive practice as a poet and painter. The journey originates from the physical canvases created by using acrylic metallic colours in her work and the original poems written directly at her easel.
To translate how these physical canvases transform significantly under changing lighting conditions, the artist recorded a video of the paintings under changing hue light wavelengths. She then programmed an interactive digital hue-wheel interface that maps directly to the timestamps of the video, allowing online users to manually change the colour wavelengths on screen.
The concept of the Journey is to enable the visitors to self-reflect on their own life journey through the lense of each goddess, the artists paintings, poetry and music. In other words, the exhibition functions as an interactive, self-reflective journey.
Users navigate through the eight paintings and their corresponding poems, being offered reflective questions alongside the colour-selection wheel. The website tracks the user's colour selections through an inner descent and ascent, utilising Carl Jung’s psychological concepts to display a personal analysis at the conclusion of the experience.
This art is not made to be looked at but to be entered: each room asks you to find something of yourself in it, until the work is no longer about the paintings but about the person standing before them - until we see yourself. Raw in reflection, realising we are not flawed. If Greek gods could have struggled - why we cannot?
The Journey is comprised of four distinct concepts:
The Descent - Journey of Acceptance: The Core Trilogy: a merciful forgetting, a missed fortune, a truth that can no longer be deferred.The Ascent - Journey of Recognition (Becoming One): five goddesses, five thresholds - identity, desire, balance, choice, joy. Between them, the mirror room, where questions arrive in the dark. At the end, the witness wall, where every visitor leaves honest sentences and, for the first time, is not alone. Visitor can send their self-reflection to public honesty wall. Visible to all.
Everything here is real: her own canvases, filmed under real changing light - metallic pigment mixed into the paint, no filters, nothing generated. Nothing is fake. Her poems, written at the easel are reflected in the accompanying songs, which are mastered to ensure they sing through every room. The work is never the same twice, because it is written by whoever enters. It was purpose built to help others define their Journey.
The uploaded audio belongs to artist's poem Sand, which lives on the Witness Wall — the final room of the Journey. It carries the longing for healing, and a glimpse of what a visitor might feel standing there.
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 the work itself is made.
The 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 and film 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 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
