Ripples of Gold

48h x 36w inches / 121.92h x 91.44w cm

acrylic paint on canvas

$5,200 USD

What if beauty could speak? I used to wonder about this often. Then I realized that it already does. The problem was never its silence - it was my fluency. It took me time to learn its language, but now I recognize it anywhere - a dimensional, physical song. Not long ago I was struck with how light and water together may be its loudest voice of all. Theirs is a scene that demands your attention. Forces you to stop mid-thought, to gasp before you even know why. I caught a moment like this, in the haze of a twilight evening. The moon was just rising, beginning to glide along the water's dark surface, scattering its brilliant, golden light atop the waves. But it was less of a pattern than a conversation - light saying something to water, and water, somehow, answering back.

This is when I realized that beauty, really, is intentionally systematic. I like to think of each sunset like an exclamation point. Perhaps fog, dark and mysterious, is a question mark. Flowers seem like adjectives. And it certainly is no language that I’m used to, but I would dare to say that it's better.

That same night I saw that light must be a verb. Light does something – it illuminates, transforms, bends, breaks, changes everything it touches. Similarly, verbs are concerned with action and movement. Water is slightly different, I believe its figure of speech is a pronoun. Water does not have a fixed shape or color of its own, it adapts to whatever it reflects, is poured into, or holds. Pronouns operate in the same way; they don't have inherent meaning, they stand in for whatever noun they're near. And so light acts on water, and water becomes whatever it reflects. Like a moonbeam, causing the dark waters to reflect its light- scattering ripples of gold.

I heard this language that night, except something else occurred. A third voice joined in - the deep melodious hum of mercy, mixed among the glittering frequencies of light, and the quiet reflections of water, it was present. Not a whisper.

Deep. Overwhelming. Undeserved mercy.

I haven't yet discerned where mercy falls into this language, but maybe that's the point. Perhaps it's fitting that mercy is the one thing beauty's grammar cannot fully categorize. It is not absent, I just haven't been fluent long enough to hear it clearly. Maybe mercy isn't a verb, or a pronoun, or a mark of punctuation at all. Maybe it's closer to a tone - a quality that changes how every other word in the sentence is read, without ever being a word itself.

Ripples of Gold represents my infatuation with this voice. But more than that, it is an invitation - to come with me, to learn, to understand the language of beauty.

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