Selected Returns
Paintings born from dreams, waking visions and remembrance.
Across recurring images of water, roots, portals, DNA, butterflies, feminine figures, ancestral presence, darkness and light, Leasha Richards Miller creates symbolic narratives concerned with transformation and the act of remembering.
Some works begin in sleep. Others arrive through waking visions. Rather than illustrating those experiences literally, the paintings preserve their symbolic language.
The Mega Bite
The Mega Bite emerged from a dream in 2022 examining the relationship between knowledge, technology, power and human freedom.
The Apple
Humanity is offered only a small piece of an apple without realizing that the entire apple already belongs to them. The apple intentionally echoes the story of Adam and Eve—knowledge, temptation, choice and consequence.
The Hand / Exchange
An enormous hand holds the apple. Its exaggerated scale represents how systems or individuals perceived to possess power can appear much larger than the individual. The “cell” becomes a symbolic play on confinement: human voices contained within the cell phone.
The Book and Golden Key
The final panel introduces the possibility of liberation. A book represents knowledge, while a golden key represents the extraordinary value of awareness.
“What are we willing to give up for what we are getting—especially when what we seek may have belonged to us all along?”
Click to enlargeThe Rite of Remembrance
The Rite of Remembrance emerged from a waking vision concerning cultural interruption, ancestral transmission and the recovery of purpose.
In the vision, elders and younger generations gathered away from the city in a ceremonial space surrounded by the elements—earth, water, fire, air and spirit.
Knowledge moved symbolically through DNA from elder to descendant, awakening each individual to something already carried within them.
The work considers what can happen when systems of cultural transmission are violently interrupted—and what becomes possible when descendants begin searching for what was severed.
The ceremony depicted is not intended as a reconstruction of a historically documented African ritual. It preserves the symbolic language in which the vision appeared to the artist.
“Knowledge does not disappear. It waits to be remembered.”
Click to enlargeBecause of the Roots
Because of the Roots emerged from a vision about the seasons of human existence.
Just as Earth moves through winter, spring, summer and fall, human beings experience seasons of growth, abundance, decline, stillness and renewal.
The female figure becomes both woman and tree. Within her is new life. Beneath her are roots. Branches extend from her body, dissolving the boundary between human being and living landscape.
Birth, death and rebirth therefore become not opposites, but different stages of a continuous cycle.
Even when nothing appears to be growing, the roots remain.
They hold memory. They hold nourishment. And they hold the possibility of what comes next.
“We blossom because of our roots.”
Click to enlargeMedusa
Medusa originated in a dream in which she asked the artist to paint her and retell her story.
In the dream, Medusa revealed that she does not turn people to stone. Her eyes are a mirror.
Those who meet her gaze encounter the contents of their own souls. What petrifies them is not Medusa herself, but what they discover within.
The legendary gaze therefore becomes an instrument of self-recognition rather than simply a weapon.
The painting asks what happens when a figure remembered as a monster is given the opportunity to reclaim authorship of her own story.
This interpretation represents the narrative received by the artist through the dream rather than a claim about the historical origin of the Medusa myth.
“The gaze is not the punishment. The reflection is.”
Click to enlargeMetanoia
Metanoia explores profound inner transformation through the alignment of heart and mind.
At the center, an anatomical heart and brain are connected through a golden portal. Gold represents the value of the passage itself—the precious threshold through which transformation becomes possible.
Inside that threshold is darkness.
Within the symbolic language of the painting, darkness is not evil. It represents the hidden, uncomfortable and unresolved places where some of our deepest transformation occurs.
Smoke rising from the heart represents release: what belonged to the former self cannot necessarily accompany the emerging one.
Above it, orange light appears like sunrise.
Transformation occurs not by choosing heart over mind, darkness over light, or light over darkness—but through integration.
“Enter the darkness. Release what no longer serves. Emerge into light.”
Click to enlargeUnveiled
Unveiled represents what comes after transformation.
The figure embodies the authentic self stripped of disguise, expectation and dependence upon external approval.
Her exposure is not weakness. It is freedom.
She has encountered experiences that once wounded her, integrated what they taught her and reached a place where being seen no longer requires permission.
The butterfly represents transformation, but the greater transformation is internal: she no longer organizes herself around how others perceive her.
“She no longer asks the world for permission to be who she is.”
Click to enlargeBecoming Me
Before we ever learn who we are, the world begins telling us who we should be.
Reaching hands and surrounding masks represent society, family, culture, judgment and the identities we learn to perform in order to belong.
Chains surround the woman, representing expectations, inherited beliefs and roles that have attempted to define her.
Yet her eyes are closed and her face turns upward. She is remembering.
The DNA connects her journey to ancestry and generational inheritance, while the ankh evokes life and spiritual identity.
She can honor where she comes from without remaining imprisoned by everything she inherited.
She stops asking:
“Who do they need me to be?”
And begins asking:
“Who am I?”
“You can carry your ancestors without carrying every chain.”
Click to enlargePouring of Ages
Pouring of Ages explores water as more than landscape.
Within the symbolic world of Atunwa, water repeatedly appears as memory, movement, feminine presence and continuity.
The flowing forms and aquatic life suggest an existence that cannot remain fixed. Everything moves into something else: one generation into another, one state of being into another, one memory into the next.
Rather than representing a destination, the water represents passage.
What came before us continues to move through what comes after us.
“What flows through us began long before us.”
Click to enlarge11:11 — The Portal Within
11:11 is often imagined as a doorway. The Portal Within asks whether that doorway actually exists outside of us.
A solitary figure stands before a luminous threshold suspended against darkness. The scene captures the moment before crossing—the space between what is known and what has not yet been encountered.
11:11 becomes less a promise of something external and more an invitation inward.
The portal represents consciousness itself: the threshold between who we believe ourselves to be and what may be waiting beneath that identity.
Awakening does not necessarily mean escaping this world. Sometimes it means entering more deeply into ourselves.
“The doorway was never outside of you.”
Click to enlargeBefore the Wings Were Mine
There is a period of transformation in which the old self no longer fits, yet the new self has not completely emerged.
Before the Wings Were Mine occupies that space.
The imagery evokes metamorphosis not as an instantaneous revelation but as a process—one requiring surrender, uncertainty and the release of identities that once felt permanent.
The wings represent what is becoming possible. But the painting is concerned with what happens before we learn to fly.
Transformation begins long before anyone else can see its evidence.
“The wings were forming before I knew I could fly.”
Click to enlargeWhen the Sun Touched the Tree
When the Sun Touched the Tree captures the space between an ending and a new beginning.
The tree has shed its leaves and stands bare before an enormous sun. Yet what appears lifeless still contains an unseen spark.
The painting speaks to seasons when parts of our identities, circumstances or former lives have fallen away. Growth may no longer be visible, but the roots still remember.
The sun becomes both witness and catalyst, illuminating the possibility that what appears to be an ending may actually be preparing the conditions for renewal.
“For endings burn to birth the new, and dusk ignites what dawn will be.”
Click to enlargeYemoja — Mother of Waters
Yemoja — Mother of Waters is an artistic homage to the powerful maternal water Orisha of Yoruba spiritual tradition.
The figure exists between woman and water, evoking a threshold between the human, ancestral and spiritual worlds.
Water becomes origin and memory—connected symbolically to birth, femininity, protection, intuition and continuity.
Within the larger language of Atunwa Studios, Yemoja also represents return.
The painting considers water as a carrier of memory and asks whether discovering who we are sometimes requires returning toward what existed before us.
This work is the artist's personal interpretation and homage rather than an attempt to define or reproduce a canonical religious representation of Yemoja.
“The water remembers where we came from.”
Click to enlargeCthulhu — The Ancient Below
Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, The Ancient Below enters another territory within the Atunwa collection: the unknowable.
The tentacled being represents something beyond ordinary human perception—the mysterious, unsettling and incomprehensible spaces that consciousness cannot easily organize or explain.
Where other works turn toward ancestry, dreams and memory in search of understanding, The Ancient Below confronts something that resists understanding altogether.
It represents mystery without resolution. The shadow beneath the threshold.
The possibility that some things remain larger than our ability to name them.
“Not everything beneath the surface is waiting to be understood.”
On Dream Logic
My paintings begin in dreams and waking visions. I understand these experiences as invitations to remember — the self beneath expectation, ancestral knowledge interrupted by history, and the parts of ourselves we have been taught to fear or conceal.
Dreams allow impossible relationships to coexist: a woman can become a tree, DNA can appear beside an ancestor, a portal can connect the anatomical heart and mind, and mythology can speak in its own voice. I preserve that dream logic rather than forcing it into ordinary physical space.
Darkness is not treated as the opposite of light or as something inherently evil. Darkness can be gestation, confrontation, memory and transformation. Light means more after something has travelled through darkness.
What have we forgotten about ourselves — and what happens when we remember?
Available for Private Acquisition
Dimensions, provenance, shipping details and additional documentation are available upon request.
Email the Studio