Before Light Spoke

I didn’t begin this painting with an image in mind.I began with a feeling — the sensation of standing inside something that had not yet decided what it was going to become.

The surface grew slowly. Layers settled the way sediment does, one over another, carrying traces of time rather than intention. The greens, blues, and earth tones felt primordial to me — not landscape, not forest, but matter before it learned how to organize itself. I wasn’t trying to depict nature. I was listening for it.

As I worked, certain forms began to appear on their own. A circle, crossed by a vertical axis, like a coordinate or an anchor point. Not a symbol I chose, but one that insisted on being there — a quiet marker of orientation, as if something needed a place to stand before it could move forward.

Then the curved, petal-like form emerged. It hovered between fragility and presence. While painting it, I was reminded of the Eye of Horus — not the icon, but the idea of it: vision restored, perception reassembled, light returning to order. Yet this did not feel like an eye that was already seeing. It felt like the moment before sight opens, before awareness fully arrives.

At the same time, the form also brought to mind the photograph of a humpback whale’s eye, taken by Rachel Moore. There is something profoundly humbling about that image — an intelligence that does not announce itself, an awareness that looks back without urgency or demand. That quiet, ancient gaze stayed with me. The shape in this painting carries that same feeling for me: not observation, but presence.

The title Before Light Spoke came later, but it named exactly what I was circling. Light, for me, is not just illumination. It is recognition. Consciousness. The moment when something is no longer only felt, but understood. To speak is to define — and I wanted to remain just before that definition. In the pause. In the inhale.

This painting lives in that threshold space — after chaos, before order; after darkness, before clarity. The lines move, cross, dissolve, and re-form, as if geometry itself is still learning how to hold together. Nothing here is fixed. Nothing is complete. That incompleteness is essential.

I think of this work as a kind of listening. A moment when vision exists as potential rather than certainty. When the eye is forming, but not yet looking. When the world is still gathering itself, quietly, patiently — before light speaks.