A few weeks after the start of the Metro Surge, I lost a major art commission from an outstate patron who said they were uncomfortable with “how our city is behaving right now,” and with my refusal to stay quiet while my people are hurting.

I was livid, to be honest,
and even considered driving north to hand-deliver my anger like a casserole nobody asked for but everybody would smell.

Instead though, I saved gas, I went back to the studio,
and spent a couple of days painting this cardinal.

I painted another cardinal a few weeks back,
and put some words with that one as well.
In those words, I spoke about the feral sermon in his feathers,
the red that refuses to RSVP,
the color that doesn’t knock so much as kick the door open
and ask why survival keeps getting called controversial.

That first cardinal taught me
that red is not as much decoration as it is an alarm.
Red is what shows up when truth runs out of synonyms.

This new one feels different though.
Sharper. Or more present, at least.
This one feels like it has been watching
armored vehicles idle outside apartment buildings,
watching families rehearse contingency plans
the way families in the burbs rehearse vacation packing lists.

Here is what I’m learning as this cardinal came to be in the midst of our city holding its breath:

If you cannot stand on your convictions,
you are posturing and not standing at all.

You are hovering somewhere
between comfort and cowardice,
mistaking approval for oxygen.

Convictions are load-bearing.
They are the beams that hold the roof up
when helicopters circle low enough to make prayer feel like whispering into a siren.

And yes — absolutely, named it at the top — standing costs you things.
Sometimes said things are commissions.
Other times said things are invitations
and being liked by people who only loved the version of you that never required them to witness suffering up close.

But anything you keep by abandoning yourself was never yours to begin with.

The cardinal knows this to be true.
This bird does not tone itself down when winter arrives.
It doesn’t consult first with the snow to see if visibility is still appropriate right now.

It only gets louder.
An embodied exclamation mark existing in a paragraph written entirely in frost.
And so, in that spirit of the cardinal that cuts across the grey of winter, here’s my ask:

Stop auditioning your integrity for audiences who call terror “policy” because it doesn’t live on their block.

You do not owe your glow to anyone
who benefits from your dimming.
You do not have to survive by becoming swallowable.
You are allowed to be the color
that interrupts the weather the colorless drag in.

Now is the time to take an inconvenient stand.
Be the cardinal.
Be the siren.
Be the impossible red
that refuses to apologize for reminding winter that it has never once been permanent.

• 1.25″ (3.18 cm) thick poly-cotton blend canvas
• Canvas fabric weight: 10.15 +/- 0.74 oz./yd.² (344 g/m² +/- 25g/m²)
• Fade-resistant
• Hand-stretched over solid wood stretcher bars
• Mounting brackets included
• Blank product sourced from the US, Canada, Europe, UK, or Australia

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