When keeping it real goes right- Beth Hoeckel
“When keeping it real goes right” @bethhoeckel spotted in Ireland
The work of Beth Hoeckel feels, at first glance, like a quiet escape from reality — but not an escapist one. Rather, it is a necessary retreat. The kind that allows you to momentarily unfasten yourself from the weight of the world in order to keep moving within it. Her collages are filled with cosmic space, vast landscapes, and small human figures lost inside something much larger than themselves. There is no drama here, no heroism. There is suspension. There is simply being.
Hoeckel was born in Baltimore, followed by years in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, before eventually returning to where it all began. She has said that constant movement shaped her personality — and that personality clearly permeates her work. You can feel it. Her images resemble records of a life in transit, frames caught between one place and another, between a decision and a hesitation. The figures in her collages are rarely anchored; more often they drift, sit at the edge of a landscape, or gaze into something that resists being named.
She works at home, in a bright room that serves as her studio. She enjoys experimenting with materials — liquid acrylics, ink, gouache — yet collage remains her constant. Old papers, fragile and sometimes crumbling in the hands, carry something that cannot be recreated today: a particular color, texture, a quiet sense of time. The medium can be demanding, but it is precisely this delicacy that gives it its strength.
Hoeckel herself says that much of her work is about “losing touch with reality in a good way.” About sinking into a waking daydream, about the relationship between humans and nature, about moments when there is no need to react or understand — it is enough simply to be. That is exactly how I experience this image. A woman who has walked a long road rests, seated on sand, gazing at a rainbow cutting through the sky. She looks like someone who has finally stopped rushing. Someone who is no longer running or fighting. Someone who allows something greater to simply happen.
When I look at it, I think: this is how I feel when I act in alignment with myself. Without explanations. Without adjusting. Without smoothing my edges to fit someone else’s expectations. Reality still exists, but it no longer presses so hard.
That is why today, on February thirteenth — International Self-Love Day — I wanted to tell the story of this work and this artist. Not as an inspiration for change, but as a reminder that the rainbow is not a reward waiting at the end of the road. The rainbow is the road — the path toward understanding and accepting oneself. Toward the moment when we stop reshaping ourselves for others and begin to see ourselves more clearly and more gently.
Do not change for someone else. Change only for yourself — and only if you truly want to. Accept yourself, and try to see yourself as your own friend, in all your imperfect, rainbow-colored complexity.
I do not promise that everything will suddenly become easy. But I believe a quiet strength appears. An inner one. The kind that allows you to stand on your own side even when the world is loud and chaotic. And at some point — almost unnoticed — the rainbow appears.
At its end there will be no pot of gold.
There will be you.
Standing by yourself and by your values is something that is built slowly.
And it is — quite sincerely — a rainbow. 🌈
