At the Year’s Quiet Edge

Ready to Surface came into being without a plan. It began as play — a moment of loosening the grip, where the hand moved before thought had time to intervene, before intention could take control. In that openness, something subtle shifted. What followed felt like a quiet pressure building beneath the surface, a joyful bubbling — light and rhythmic — as if something was moving in its own time, preparing to appear.

The painting holds that suspended moment of anticipation — the instant just before emergence within a larger cycle. Color gathers, stirs, overlaps, and circles, echoing rhythms found in breath, tides, and seasons. Layers slide past one another, transparent and opaque, revealing and concealing in the same breath. Movement here is not linear; it loops, returns, and gently insists, guided by curiosity rather than destination.

Nothing in this work is forced or resolved. Instead of closure, it offers continuity. Instead of answers, it lingers in the pleasure of becoming — in the quiet joy of allowing something to rise simply because the moment is right. The circular gestures speak of cycles already in motion: beginnings that do not announce themselves as new, but as remembered, ongoing, alive.

It is perhaps not incidental that this became the last painting I completed in 2025. Rather than closing a year with resolution, it rests within a turning — a pause inside a cycle rather than an endpoint. What surfaces here carries the joy of return, the hum of repetition infused with difference, the sense that something is always preparing itself to appear again.

This piece is less about what is seen and more about what is felt: the warmth of movement, the hum of emergence, and the quiet, sustaining joy of creation as part of a larger, living cycle.

A small, happy note to end with: in the photograph shared here, I’m holding the painting upside down. It felt entirely right to leave it that way. As an abstract work, Ready to Surface doesn’t insist on a single orientation — it invites you to meet it freely. Turn it, live with it, hang it in the way that feels most alive to you. Sometimes joy appears precisely there, in the moment we realize there is no “right” way, only the one that resonates.