Between the Worlds

It started with colour, with a surface, with the quiet process of placing one mark next to another. Although the painting was created for the traditional Easter exhibition organised by ULAK, I found myself moving away from direct sacred imagery, searching instead for something more open, instinctive, and uncertain.

Slowly, forms began to appear — not because they were planned, but because the painting itself began to suggest them.

In this work, darker shapes settled first in the lower part of the canvas. Their texture gives them a presence that feels almost geological, as if they have been there for a very long time. They carry the quiet weight of something ancient — closed forms holding the possibility of life, but also the memory of something much older.

Above them the space gradually becomes lighter and more fluid. The surface begins to shift, and a suggestion of movement appears, almost like the trace of a wing. The form is never completely fixed, yet the feeling of lift is unmistakable.

Between these two zones a pale shape emerged, as if surfacing from another element altogether. It seemed to belong neither fully to what rests below nor to what moves above, but to something in between.

The painting slowly settled into that tension: something ancient and grounded, something beginning to rise, and something suspended between the two.

That is why the work eventually found its title — Between Worlds.

A place where different states briefly meet. Where something old holds something new. Where movement begins while the past is still present.

And somewhere within that space, an old question quietly appeared:

What came first — the bird or the egg?

While painting, I caught myself answering, half smiling and half seriously:

Ichthys.