Echoes of the First Pulse

This painting began with a lump in my throat.

Not a metaphorical one - a real, physical sensation. It felt like something had lodged there, heavy and unspoken. As if my brain and heart had been severed, no longer in dialogue. Words didn’t help. I couldn’t explain it. A friend gently said, “Paint it.”

So I did.

At first, the painting was almost too clear: a heart, suspended in a bubble. A brain like a heavy stone. A line connecting the two, fragile and tentative. The metaphor felt true - the heart forms first in the womb, it is the first pulse. But what emerged on the canvas felt too exposed. Too representational. So I started covering it, layer by layer. Not to erase it, but to let it sink deeper, until it could transform into something less literal and more true.

As I worked, new forms took shape - rectangular, monumental, not fully defined. Some might see mountains. But for me, they felt like "uralt" mountains - older than time, more ancient than landscape. Not geological, but psychological. Not out there, but in here. An internal terrain, formed by pressure, silence, memory, and the slow erosion of understanding.

The painting isn't a landscape, but it holds the feeling of one. A memory of a place that never existed, except inside me.

Eventually, a warm, rusty orange emerged in the lower right - like an ember refusing to die out. And then the words came: We forgot where we came from. I wrote them into the painting like a trace, not to be noticed right away. A whisper from something beneath.

That line isn't just about personal forgetting. It speaks to something broader - the disconnection we sometimes feel from our own origins, our inner rhythm, our first pulse.

By the time the painting felt finished, the heart and brain were no longer visible. But I know they’re still there. They shaped everything, even if they’re now hidden beneath textures, lines, and veils of pigment.

Echoes of the First Pulse is a record of that journey - not from idea to execution, but from disconnection to quiet integration. From visible to invisible. From surface to source.

It’s not a painting to be solved. It’s one to be felt - slowly, like a memory returning from deep within.