Prologue of Return: Beginning Again
The world paused—and in that pause, painting found me again. Silence was not absence; it was permission.
There are moments in a life when the world slows just enough for us to hear what we’ve been ignoring. In 2020, the sudden stillness opened a space I hadn’t visited in decades—a room of silence, of waiting, of possibility. I didn’t return to painting because I had a plan. I returned because the quiet finally grew louder than the noise.
The first gesture was small: a length of string dipped in pigment, drawn across a blank surface. It left a trembling, imperfect line. That small tremor felt more honest than anything I had produced in years. It was the language I didn’t know I still spoke.
In those early weeks, I discovered that silence wasn’t emptiness—it was permission. It became the architecture for a new attention. I stopped trying to solve problems and started listening instead. Painting revealed itself not as a decision but as a condition of being. The act asked nothing from me except presence. In that presence, my eyes relearned how to see.
Returning to art after thirty years in business and technology wasn’t a reversal. It was a continuation of a deeper line—one that had been waiting beneath the surface, dormant but alive. My background in logic and structure didn’t disappear; it reshaped itself. The discipline I once gave to systems became the discipline of breath, tone, and proportion.
Painting offered a new kind of honesty. Every gesture recorded my state of awareness. Every hesitation became visible. There was no performance in the studio, no need for coherence. The canvas didn’t want an explanation; it wanted attention. And the more I gave, the more it gave back.
Beginning again taught me something essential: creativity is not a talent or a phase—it is a return. A return to curiosity, to vulnerability, to the delicate truth of what we feel before we name it. The work I make now is not about perfection. It is about presence. The line becomes a pulse, the color becomes breath, the surface becomes a moment held long enough for meaning to form.
To begin again is not to repeat the past. It is to encounter yourself with new eyes.
My upcoming book, The Shape of Seeing: The Genesis of Abstraction, explores this return in depth — coming soon.
