Residual Current

“Residual Current” did not begin where the previous painting ended. It began afterwards — in the quieter space that remained once I stopped resisting what had already been seen.

“Traces From Within” was dense, tangled and difficult. It carried the weight of everything that had insisted on staying: old patterns, difficult experiences, sharpness, confusion, things I might once have wanted to smooth over or make more beautiful. But at a certain point, that painting no longer asked to be changed. It simply stood there, asking to be met as it was.

Slowly, I understood that this was not only true of the painting.

There are parts of ourselves we keep trying to rearrange, soften or overcome. Parts we wish were easier, lighter, less complicated. Yet sometimes nothing changes until we stop standing against them. Until we allow them to belong.

“Residual Current” emerged from that moment.

Not from resolution. Not from forgetting.

From acceptance.

The same traces are still present here, but they no longer carry the same weight. What was once tangled has loosened. What once felt thorny and compressed has become softer, more spacious, almost weightless. The lines are still there, crossing, repeating, circling back on themselves — but now they move differently. They no longer struggle to be released. They drift.

While painting, I had the feeling that I was watching something settle inside me. Not disappear, not heal in any simple sense, but find a different place to exist.

There is still movement in this painting, but it no longer comes from tension. It comes from what remains after tension has been lived through.

Perhaps that is why the painting became pale, quiet and almost monochrome. After the heaviness of ochres, blacks and rust-coloured marks, I found myself reaching for muted blues and whites. Not because they are easier or more beautiful, but because they felt like the emotional residue of what had already happened — the breath after crying, the strange calm that sometimes follows when you finally stop fighting your own history.

There is one more feeling that stayed with me while painting “Residual Current”.

The painting reminds me of the sea after a storm.

Not the storm itself — not the crashing waves, the darkness or the violence of it — but what comes afterwards. The moment when everything has already passed, when the surface begins to quiet, yet the water still carries its memory. The waves are softer now, longer, slower. The storm is gone, but its movement remains.

That is how this painting feels to me.

Not as a return to peace untouched, but as a different kind of calm — one that can exist only after everything has been felt.

The forms in “Residual Current” are made from the same language as before, yet they no longer speak of entrapment. They speak of memory, of afterimages, of currents that continue to move beneath the surface long after we think something is over.

I used to think that accepting the difficult parts of ourselves would make them disappear.

Now I think they remain, but differently.

Less like a wound.

More like a current that continues to move quietly through us, becoming part of who we are.