And Yet, It Was There

For almost two months I did not paint.

At first, it felt reasonable. There were other things to do, other demands, other forms of tiredness. But as the days passed, the distance from the studio became something else.

Not rest, but hesitation.

I kept postponing the moment of sitting in front of the canvas.

What if there was nothing there? What if I no longer knew how to begin? What if the quiet that had once felt necessary had become too large?

The longer I waited, the more convincing those thoughts became.

And yet, one day, I sat down.

I did not have a plan. I did not have an image in mind. I only had the first gesture, then another. A line, a surface, a layer that resisted the next one. Slowly, the painting began to speak in its own way.

There were forms that almost met, but did not. A dark weight in one part of the canvas, a curve in another, a narrow passage of yellow between them. At first I did not understand why they appeared. Only later did I realise that the painting was not about absence at all.

It was about return.

Not a dramatic return, not a sudden recovery of certainty. Something quieter than that. The recognition that what I feared I had lost had remained somewhere beneath the surface all along.

While painting, I caught myself thinking: see how beautiful this is, why do you not paint?

And together with that came something I had not expected after such a long pause: joy.

Not excitement, not relief, but a quiet, unmistakable joy in the act itself.

The joy of watching something emerge without knowing what it would become. The joy of being surprised by a colour, by a line, by the way one shape answered another. The joy of feeling, for a while, entirely inside the work.

Not beautiful because the work was easy. It was not. The painting changed direction more than once. I turned it, covered parts of it, doubted it, waited. But beneath all of that there was a feeling I had almost forgotten: the deep, wordless pleasure of being inside the process.

The pleasure of not needing to know in advance.

Perhaps that is what painting has always been for me. Not the certainty of having something to say, but the willingness to remain with what is still unclear. To follow a trace before I understand where it leads. To trust that meaning can emerge slowly, through layers, interruptions, hesitation, and return.

This painting carries that experience.

Its title, And Yet, It Was There, does not refer only to the image itself. It refers to that quiet realisation that after all the postponing, all the doubt, all the fear that nothing would come, something was still there.

Not unchanged. Not waiting untouched.

But present.

And perhaps that is enough.