When Silence Was No More

This painting began as an exploration — gauze pressed into natural pigments, spirulina shifting slowly over time, turning the surface into a tender, bluish estuary. It hung quietly on the wall for almost two years. A soft witness, changing only with the light and with time.

And then, one evening, something broke open in me.

I tore the gauze away, stripping it like a bandage.

Beneath it appeared a surface like new skin after a scab falls off — fragile, tender, pink.

And over this new, vulnerable skin I chose not soft tones, but the force of the primaries: red, yellow, blue. The root colors. The beginning of all beginnings. From them, every other color in the spectrum is born. It felt like a return to essence — raw energy, unrefined, uncompromising. A choice to cover vulnerability not with protection, but with the power of what is most elemental.

Above them all, a broad band of white emerged, like a canopy, a breath, a sky. White — the gathering of every color, yet also the clearing away of all of them. It became both shelter and horizon, a reminder that even in fire and force there is space for silence, for clarity.

Two circles insisted on appearing, uninvited yet undeniable. And words began to pulse inside me, louder and louder, until they demanded to be written on the canvas:

Fire, come forth.

Set me free.

Kindle the fire that burns in me.

Only afterwards came the dream of the dragon.

It flew low above the streets of my city, turning its head left and right, searching for me. I hid, afraid of its power — yet I saw it smile as it looked for me.

I knew then that it had not come to harm me, but to show me what I had already called forth.

The painting was the fire.

The dream was the dragon.

And both were me — the part of me that no longer wished to stay silent.