Collection: Fleur du Cœur Collection

In this special work, Mary's tear is not a tear of surrender. It is a call to return to our trust in God. Something happened that I never anticipated in this piece. Before I even released the completed artwork, I showed only Mary's face in a reel that I posted on social media. Not some carefully engineered viral campaign. I hardly ever get on Instagram. Most of my Instagram reels are just cross-posted automatically from Facebook. I wasn’t chasing an algorithm. I wasn’t trying to figure out the perfect hook. I wasn’t trying to get three million views in a few days. The reel is ten seconds long and doesn't show the the complete drawing. You don’t see her veil and, I never told anyone who she was. There wasn’t some explanation of Mary. The caption was basically, ‘No caption needed.’ And somehow she started traveling- India, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Indonesia. Several million views. Almost everybody seeing her has never followed me before. Different languages. Different religions. Different cultures. Different ages. Some people recognized her immediately as Mary. Some knew her as Maryam. Some had absolutely no idea who she was. One person in India guessed that she was a film star. And then there was this comment from Turkey that I cannot get out of my head. Someone showed the reel to a woman sitting with her cigarette and her tea. She watched it again and again. The first thing she said was: ‘A star is falling from the girl’s eye.’ She didn’t know she was looking at Mary. She didn’t even understand that what she was seeing was a tear yet. She watched it eleven times. Star. Strange mark. Maybe a snake. Then finally: ‘The girl is crying.’ And I keep thinking about that. Before she recognized sorrow, she saw light. And none of these people had even seen the whole piece. They still haven’t seen the veil. And the veil matters. That part of the drawing is tied to Mary’s veil and to the relic tradition surrounding it. Millions of people responded before they ever saw that part of the story. Then a priest asked me something I wasn’t expecting. He asked if I had compared the face I drew to known Marian apparitions. So I did. I started looking. And nothing I found really looked like her. I want to be very careful with that as I am not saying this is an apparition. I am not saying this reel is a miracle. I don’t know what it is. I am saying I am curious. Really curious. I then tried the obvious technical explanation. I intentionally posted a trial reel. Twenty-four hours later it had about 101 views. Again, the number itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that simply using the trial-reel feature clearly does not explain what happened with this one. So yes, there is an algorithm. Of course there is. There are watch times, shares, saves, replays, recommendations — all of those things explain how content can spread. But what I keep wondering about is the other question: Why this? Why this face? Why this tear? Why these countries? Why now? Why was the song already waiting? Why did a body of work that began with fleur-de-lis almost twenty years ago eventually lead me into sacred art, then music, then motion, then augmented reality, and now somehow to a ten-second image of Mary moving around the world? I’ve spent the last few years writing about wanting God to use me. And lately I have wondered "What if this is what that looks like?" Not something dramatic. Maybe God uses a pencil. Maybe He uses a song. Maybe He uses technology. Maybe He even uses an algorithm. Maybe all of these things I thought were separate — the fleur-de-lis, Sacred Heart, the songs, the movement, the augmented reality, my faith journey — were actually teaching me how to make art that could travel farther than I ever could. I don’t know. But I do know this: I never set out to show Mary to millions of people. And somehow, millions of people have now stopped and looked at her. Some knew her. Some remembered her. Some met her without even knowing her name. And she is still traveling.