Emerging from the Darkness: A Shimmer Toward Becoming

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2024
Collection: Organic Movement

Emerging from the Darkness is a painting born of friction and light—where opposing energies coexist, blur, and move toward something unspoken. At 60 inches square, it offered me a field to explore gesture as revelation, and to let oil paint—dragged, pulled, and shredded by twine—speak its own language of emergence.

This piece began as an act of surrender. I didn’t impose an image. I set a rhythm in motion: pulling twine through oil, letting it catch, fracture, and splinter across the canvas. What emerged was not a design, but a field of tension—a visual collision between weight and release.

The central divide—a hard line between black and white—is not a boundary, but a seam. The left side feels dense, lunar, almost geological. The right bursts into kinetic swirls and fractured gestures, as if something dormant has suddenly remembered how to move. The marks are unpredictable, erratic, full of force—and yet delicate in their transparency, like wings made of smoke.

Painting this felt like negotiating with darkness—not to conquer it, but to move through it, to shape light from within it. I think we all carry these moments: when what was still begins to stir, when what was hidden begins to ask for space. That’s what this painting holds for me. Not clarity. Not resolution. But motion—glimpsed, earned, half-formed, and real.

Emerging from the Darkness is about that flicker at the edge of becoming. That moment when something inside shifts, and you don’t yet know what it is—but you know it’s happening.

And in that knowing, you begin to move.