Karmic Ouroboros

Every action leaves a trace. Every ending carries the possibility of another beginning.

One canvas, two identities

The painting began as Kristiina, a portrait of a girlfriend in her spirit form. Its first identity grew from tenderness, fascination and love. When the relationship ended, Jaret added a tear beneath the eye. He continued painting through the weeks that followed, completing the original portrait before photographing it and sending the finished image to the woman who inspired it.

Only after that act of completion did he choose to transform the same canvas. Kristiina had fulfilled its first purpose. Its finished identity survives in photographs; the physical painting began another life.

The metamorphosis

Violet and blue spread over existing details. Familiar forms were covered, dismantled and rebuilt. What had begun as a representation of another person became an expression of the artist’s own experience: a movement, in his words, from the Divine Feminine to the Divine Masculine.

The central figure is a witness. His gaze holds anger and hurt, but his stillness expresses the possibility of remaining at peace with his own actions. He is not the spirit beneath the water. He watches without allowing himself to be consumed.

Cycles, consequence and protection

The serpent emerges through the brow and curls back into the composition, alluding to the ouroboros: a cycle of destruction and renewal. Jaret brings that image together with karma as action unfolding into consequence. Karmic Ouroboros is his contemporary synthesis of these ideas—a symbolic exploration of repeating patterns, rather than a judgment about another person’s fate.

At the left, the submerged spirit represents a pattern struggling to escape its own repetition. Metatron’s Cube serves as the artist’s symbol of spiritual protection and higher order, counterbalancing the serpent and the spirit’s struggle.

A story still being painted

The work remains in progress. The planned chains connecting the spirit to the lotus, the intensified struggle beneath the water, and refinements to the serpent’s volume and scales are part of the next stage. These are intended additions, not completed details in the photograph above.

Nothing is simply erased. It becomes part of what follows.

Sometimes, transformation requires the death of what came before.

Adapted from Jaret Pollard’s Karmic Ouroboros — The Metamorphosis, revised artist’s storybook, 2026.