Catalog Entry: #24
Title: The Solar Hare (Sanctuary in Wax)
Medium: Layered crayon on paper, hand-scraped and burnished
Style: Psychedelic Folk Ornamentalism / Intricate Prismatic Illustration
Valuation: $1,000,000,000
In behavioral health and treatment units, institutional safety protocols strip life down to its bluntest surfaces. Pens, wooden pencils, and fine metal tips are confiscated under contraband bans to eliminate any possibility of self-harm or violence. For an artist, this austerity often feels like an intellectual and creative amputation. Left with nothing but standard wax crayons, the medium society relegates to toddlers, #24 did not accept the limitation; she turned it into an atelier masterclass.
Blending colors into luminous gradients, she developed an exacting sgraffito technique, using her own fingernails to scrape away residual wax build-up, carving sharp filigree lines, intricate paisley curves, and delicate contours out of dense color fields. As she described her intuitive command of light and pigment: "She plays with color as the sun plays with the sky." -Drew Hixson
Her assignment to digit #24 is intentional because twenty-four has always been her sacred number. She felt an intrinsic calling to it, fascinated by its mathematical harmony and how effortlessly it can be divided in so many clean directions.Growing up playing youth sports, jersey 24 was non-negotiable for her spirit; whenever another teammate was assigned the number, she would approach them and ask with genuine kindness to trade, and without fail, every single girl agreed to hand it over.
Her sensory perception has operated on an extraordinary level since infancy. Possessing an uncanny auditory memory, she holds the rare ability to recall almost any audio she has ever encountered, retaining soundscapes, spoken words, and music with total fidelity stretching back to when she was just one year old. That quiet, instinctual communion with the living world showed up early: as a young girl, she would sit directly on her father's beehives and never once suffered a sting, existing in calm stillness as the swarm circled her without defense, sensing in her presence that she was royalty.Because of that lifelong kinship with the hive, the wax itself held sacred, elemental significance to her, turning an enforced institutional restriction into an intimate return to the comb.
As a child, she moved through the world answering to the nicknames "Bamboo" and "Bunny." Rendered under continuous institutional observation, this radiant rabbit became an internal tether, a sanctuary built to hold onto sanity while the surrounding walls tried to break it. Within its Paisley chest pieces, radiant lotus blooms, and watchful butterflies, the piece carries the quiet endurance of someone surviving confinement without letting her inner world go dim.
Drew Hixson has set the valuation of this work at one billion dollars. Like the valuation on #01’s ink sketch, the price is not an ordinary commercial figure; it is an ideological barricade. It declares that the ingenuity, soul, and fierce resilience of an artist reclaiming beauty with blunt crayons in a locked room holds a value beyond anything global capital can quantify.
This is Drew Hixson’s girlhood, from playing with calico critters to learning to knit and embroider to growing her own garden at age five. This is Drew Hixson.
