Refusal to Fade

Refusal to Fade (Poem)

Color collides (color = emotions)
Fractures (collision leads to fracture)
Accelerates (but the fracture is not able to pull me down, instead I accelerate)

Everything moves at once — (everything = the world, the demands from us, pressures, responsibilities)

too fast,
too loud,
too much.

And still…
the center surges brighter. (Still, we don’t give up)

Not because the chaos stops—
but because something inside refuses to dim.

It is choosing presence
when disappearing would be easier.

I do not fade when I fracture.
I grow.

I do not disappear in the breaking—
I accelerate.

Every collision teaches momentum.
Every crack lets light through.

I insist on presence.
On growth.
On forward motion.

Even when the ground shifts—
I stay.

Even when the world demands silence—
I speak.

Color still collides.
The world still moves.

And I—
refuse
to fade.

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Aatmica Ojha is an abstract expressionist painter based in Murray, Utah, whose work treats color as a language for the emotions we rarely speak aloud. Born in India in 1989, she was making greeting cards for friends by the age of four — an early instinct to turn feeling into something she could give away. She earned a BS in Fashion & Apparel Design (with distinction) from Bangalore University and spent two years as an in-house boutique designer before returning, in 2016, to her first love: painting.

Working primarily in fluid, poured abstraction, Aatmica is drawn to color psychology and to the moment a private feeling becomes something others can stand inside. Her practice has always reached past the edge of the canvas. Over the past decade she has directed it toward people on the margins of attention — cancer patients, differently-abled artists, survivors of neurological illness, and underserved youth — donating between half and all of her sale proceeds through partners including the National Breast Cancer Foundation (U.S.) and the Cancer Patients Aid Association (India). Her painting Heart of Hope hangs at Intermountain Hospital in Riverton, Utah, and her work is held in the private collection of the Taj Hotels, India.

Just as often, her studio is a classroom or a gallery floor. Through the “Art Literacy Program” and “Together We Are Stronger” at Viewmont Elementary, she has guided more than 500 children in making art about unity, and she leads healing-centered workshops, live painting, and talks for adults moving through grief and isolation. Across all of it runs one conviction: that art can heal, empower, and draw us back toward one another.