Pansies
2026

Pansy — the word that was once enough to unmake a man. Here it returns as embroidery, and on a scale that refuses apology: great blooms of yellow, red, and purple filling the frame around a man whose lifted throat and raised arm hold nothing back. His body is bare but not offered; this is exposure on his own terms.

The stitched flowers do not soften him — they amplify him. Each petal carries tenderness into old language, threading insult into beauty, shame into bloom. He leans into his embroidered halo, guarded and radiant at once, held by the very word that once named him — and turning it, quietly, into light.

This piece is based on Richard, Texas 1963, taken by Danny Fitzgerald. He and his partner Richard Bennett ran Les Demi Dieux studio.

This work is in a private collection.