"I Will Free You" Callie Katherine Robbins

I Will Free You, 2024

Acrylic on canvas

36 x 36”

$12,216.42

I Will Free You is a self-portrait inspired by the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This short story follows a young woman who, in order to cure her depression, is isolated in a room lined with hideous yellow wallpaper. The narrator is driven to madness by the yellow wallpaper and believes she can see a woman trapped inside of it. In the final pages, the narrator’s sanity slips, she ravages the wallpaper, attempting to free the imaginary woman, and it is suggested that she hangs herself.

Throughout the painting, I imagined myself as both the woman inside the wallpaper begging for freedom, and the woman outside the wallpaper driven to madness. As this painting came to life, I imagined conversations between the two versions of myself: my internal self and my external self. Those conversations revolved around themes of loneliness, freedom, and turmoil.

The painting also reflects on my brawl with depression– the beast of my imagination.

The stages of painting this work: first expressive, then more realistic, concluding with the repetition of pattern making, can be representative of my journey into adulthood.

I’ll leave you with one question, can we truly free ourselves from the beast of our imaginations?