I recently lost my sister to cancer. The emotions I felt were like nothing I had ever experienced. Both of my parents have passed and the grief I felt was far different than when they died. As an artist, I realized the only way I could process this new grief was to visualize it. The 5 Stages of Grief series was born. I painted one painting a day for five days. I discovered I was completely exhausted after I completed the last one.

If you are a therapist or a grief counselor and you’re looking for artwork to convey grief, you might want to consider this collection. If you have more than one patient, I would recommend purchasing prints instead of the original. You can find prints available on both my Saatchi page and my ArtPal page.

The first stage is denial:

Denial is the first of the five stages of grief™️. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.

Source: Grief.com