Desert Rose
"I painted this diptych to Sting’s “Desert Rose,” which opens with Cheb Mami’s soaring, melismatic vocals—those sliding, aching raï phrases that seem to hover between notes. They pulled at something deep in me, haunting and mesmerizing, like a voice carried on heat waves. I felt it in my chest before I felt it in my ears, and it was calling me to create. As the rhythm unfurls, the music moves like desert wind—warm, pulsing, almost hypnotic. Because I have chromesthesia, color floods my vision when I listen; the golds, dusty rose tones, and desert twilight hues began swirling and drifting across my mind. With MS and CRPS, I can’t hold a brush, so I paint with my hands. I press my thumbprints into those golds and rose tones, letting each imprint carry the vibration of the music. My fingernails carve the fine, petal-like lines radiating outward—the same way desert light expands at sunrise, delicate but insistent. The songs’ drums push everything forward in waves, and in that momentum, I get to exist outside the borders of my body. The chronic pain that’s with me every day softens, loosens its grip, and I dissolve into movements, textures & colors. As the shapes began to unfold—blooming like petals opening in desert heat—I felt something shift. These pieces became a place where sound turns into form, where I can be me and not my limitations. When I imagine “Desert Rose” hanging somewhere out in the world—seen by someone who feels something in its colors or shapes—it fills me with a deep sense of purpose. If spauses for even a moment and feels warmth, possibility, stillness, or beauty reflected back at them... then the painting has done what the music did for me. It carried something forward. It gave them light."
- Shana Stern
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