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Acrylic on 4 sheets of 24"x32" plexiglass, and 2 sheets of 18"x24" plexiglass. Date: January 2026.
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In April of 2025 I was diagnosed with stage 4 gallbladder cancer. I was laying in the hospital bed with a bunch of doctors talking to me. My head spinning. It was hard to concentrate on what they were saying to me. After a while all the doctors left except one, Ali Abubaker. He is a surgen, and told me there was nothing he could do for me. How wrong he was.
Somehow we started talking about my art. He looked at a few images of my paintings that I had on my iPhone. He loved them and said that I should paint about my cancer experience. My head was still spinning. Painting was the last thing on my mind. I asked him what in the world would I paint? Everything he said came down to hope.
A few months later it came to me in a flash. I was at the Florida Cancer Specialists center where I get my treatments and on the wall was a bell! What in the world! I read the inscription next to the bell and everything fell into place. I knew exactly how I would paint my experience.
Cancer is a life changing event. The first option for therapy is usually Chemotherapy. For those who have gone through it, or know someone that has gone through it, the bell has a special meaning. It means you have compleated your chemotherapy and can ring that bell. Unfortunatly, not everyone is able to sucessfully complete chemotherapy. I wanted to create a painting that representes my experience as well as those thousands of people in the same life changing situation as me.
This painting is dedicated to those battling cancer with the hope that they can ring that bell.
