Diptych Portraits
Through Spiraling Out and Receding In, Hixson learned that the body carries its own seasons, and that by painting dysphoria and grief as weathered landscapes, rupture can become a site of transformation rather than something to be erased.
Spiraling Out
March of 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, 18"x24"
Receding In
March of 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, 18"x24"
In this diptych of self-portraits, Hixson explores the intertwined forces of gender dysphoria, emotional transformation, and with his ongoing relationship with the natural world. Each painting reflects a different season of inner experience, mirroring the ways nature expands, contracts, fractures, and heals.
The first piece, Spiraling Out, emerged from a moment of intense anxiety. Its orange background churns with turbulent, exposed brushstrokes, an echo of the way dysphoria can disrupt the body’s sense of stillness. While painting it, Hixson felt unmoored, as though the energy inside him had spilled outward and stained the space around his body. The figure becomes a landscape in upheaval: raw, unsettled, and honest. Nature here is not gentle but elemental, mirroring a storm that refuses containment.
The second piece, Receding In, moves into a quieter, more grounded register. Created while mourning a loved one, it traces how grief can settle into the body like sediment and, in time, reshape it. The grey background softens the figure, allowing light to rest more delicately across the form. In making this painting, Hixson felt serene, a sensation of standing at the shoreline after a storm, aware of all that was lost yet surrounded by a new stillness. Through painting, he discovered that grief, like nature, can be transformed into something unexpectedly beautiful.
Together, these works chart a cycle of inner weather. They reflect his belief that the body is not separate from nature but deeply connected to its rhythms of destruction and renewal. In confronting dysphoria and loss, he finds himself returning, again and again, to the possibility that creation can emerge from rupture, and that beauty is often born from the most unsettled terrains within us.