The Quiet Threshold — Painting as Perception, Presence, and Transformation

My paintings begin in quiet — in that pause between what is seen and what is felt. I’m drawn to the liminal space where presence and absence, solidity and dissolution, light and shadow coexist. Each work evolves through slow attention: looking, layering, responding, until the boundary between subject and perception begins to blur.

I often return to ordinary objects — vessels, rooms, fragments of the domestic world — but they are never simply still lifes. They are meditations on seeing and remembering, on how light shifts and surfaces breathe. Stillness, for me, is never fixed; it vibrates with time. Painting becomes a threshold — not a record of what is there, but an invocation of what hovers just beyond reach: a memory, a sensation, a vibration of light.

I approach painting as a form of inquiry — a way of thinking through material. The brushstroke, the transparent glaze, the slow drying of paint all carry meaning. My process often begins with thin, watery acrylics, over which I build opaque forms that feel grounded yet porous. Layers emerge and dissolve, creating a sense of depth that is less spatial than psychological. I’m interested in how a surface can hold contradiction — solidity and vaporousness, order and flux.

Perception itself is at the heart of my work. Influenced by artists such as Bridget Riley and Morandi, I explore how small shifts in tone, colour, or rhythm can change what we see. Light and dark pulse against one another; stillness meets movement; surface meets depth. Sometimes a subtle dissonance — a misplaced shadow, a pattern slightly out of sync — creates a quiet tension, a vibration that keeps the image alive.

The objects I paint — vessels, tables, interiors — often hover between solidity and dissolution. I’m fascinated by how the same object, seen in different light or mood, becomes something else entirely. This mutability extends to the viewer’s experience: I believe that meaning is not fixed in the work, but arises in the meeting between painting and viewer — in that space of shared perception.

At the heart of my practice is a paradox: the desire to paint stillness while knowing that nothing is ever truly still. My paintings inhabit that “moment between” — between light and dark, presence and disappearance, movement and rest. They are records of time spent looking, feeling, adjusting — an accumulation of small decisions that together produce calm.

What emerges is a personal theory of perception: that seeing is an act of empathy, that attention itself can be transformative, and that meaning exists somewhere between intention and perception. Painting, for me, is not representation but conversation — a quiet exchange between material, light, and the act of looking.

My paintings don’t announce themselves; they whisper. They ask for time, for stillness, for presence. In their quietness, I hope they open a space where the ordinary becomes luminous — where seeing and feeling meet, and stillness begins to breathe.