Gallery Collection 79 - ‘The Cost of Being Me’

Gallery Collection 79 brings you 'The Cost of Being Me’. This one puts the message right on the surface. Thick, tar-black impasto covers the canvas, scraped and gouged with deep marks. You can see where the palette knife dragged, where it stuttered, where it dug in. Against that heavy ground, neon bursts explode. Acid green, electric blue, hot pink, safety orange. They drip, splatter, and float like bioluminescent cells in a void. Nothing is blended or polite. The colors fight the black for space. Then on the left, three words in raised gold letters: JUST BE YOU. They are literal and unmissable. The gold catches light while everything around it absorbs it.

Through a neurodivergent lens, this is the shutdown vs. the unmasking. The black is not emptiness. It is overwhelm. It is sensory shutdown, burnout, the weight of pretending to be palatable for other people. It is thick because that state is hard to move through. But the neon is you. It is your actual neurology. The stim joy, the special interests, the pattern recognition, the way your brain lights up in colors other people cannot see. The black tries to drown it but the colors are solvent and alive. They keep rising to the surface. And the gold text is both command and permission. "Just be you" sounds easy until you realize how many systems are built to punish you for it. So you had to glue it down in gold. You had to make it solid and external. This piece is not inspirational poster fluff. It is a fight. The real you against the pressure to disappear. And the real you is winning, drop by drop.