"Cloudless Sulphur Over Old Pearl" (2025)

WiL Vélez, Cloudless Sulphur Over Old Pearl, 2025.

acrylic on cradled wood panel

14H x 18W x 1.5D in (35.56 x 45.72 x 3.81 cm) 

Cloudless Sulfur Over Old Pearl (2025) marks a meaningful expansion within my ongoing Winged Rivers series, extending its geographic and conceptual focus from the river systems of southern Louisiana into Mississippi. This shift reflects a lifetime spent moving across the border between these two states, regularly crossing the Old Pearl River and the bayous that connect it to the Pearl River, which defines the southernmost boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi. These waterways have never felt like dividers to me, but rather connective tissue—linking landscapes, histories, and lived experience.

The interconnectedness of the Old Pearl and the Pearl River binds my past and present. I was born in Mississippi, and I now live in New Orleans, where my mother's family has Indigenous roots. In this painting, aerial views of the Old Pearl River are integrated into the wing structures of the Cloudless Sulphur butterfly. This visual synthesis continues the central language of Winged Rivers, where the branching logic of rivers mirrors the vein structures of wings, revealing shared patterns across natural systems.

The Cloudless Sulphur carries particular emotional weight for me. These butterflies were common in the cow fields of Pearl River County where I grew up, places where I first began honing my skills through close observation of the natural world. By merging geography and biology through abstraction, this work reflects an enduring relationship to place and presents the Gulf South as an interconnected ecological and cultural landscape shaped by movement, balance, and continuity.

This is a unique, original artwork. Its image, like all images on this website, is the copyright of ©️WiL Vélez. All rights reserved.