In The Bruising Grief of Winter, bare branches claw upward through waxen snow, their shapes formed from embedded sticks and inked line — fragile, wounded, enduring. Beneath them, a low stone wall emerges from the frozen ground like a boundary, or perhaps a memory. This encaustic painting is textured with sorrow: the accretion of ice and time, of what is weathered and what is buried. It speaks to the quiet ache of loss held in winter’s stillness — when even the land seems bowed under the weight of remembering.