patinated gold leaf on card.
framed in a mat black frame with a black mat and Ultra Vue museum glass.
framed size 57cm x 46cm
Ascension Series of 5 paintings
New Horizons was born from that quiet inner space where endings dissolve and something unnamed begins to rise. As I painted, I felt like I was standing at the edge of an internal threshold—not looking backward, not yet stepping forward—just breathing in the stillness of becoming.
The upper band represents the shift—where the sky fractures into light, where the atmosphere becomes a portal. I laid gold leaf across this horizon not for its shine, but for its symbolism: sacred illumination. But I couldn’t leave it untouched. I applied chemicals—oxidisers and patinating agents—to age it, to disrupt its perfection, to allow time and transformation to etch their story into the metal. The gold responded by blooming into unexpected textures—burnished, tarnished, alchemised—just like the soul in transition.
The horizon glows with that tension between beauty and decay, light and rust. It became a seam—between dimensions, between knowing and unknowing. A rusted red band formed naturally through the process, like a wound, or a scar healed by fire. It felt like the moment of crossing—where something is sacrificed, and something is gained.
Below that line, I invited in the depth—the gestational dark. A terrain that holds memory, gravity, stillness. But it is not inert. Within the dark, pigments shift and flicker—purple, ochre, traces of green. There is life here, composting, dreaming, preparing. It is the place where potential roots itself before it rises.
New Horizons is about that sacred pause—where breath meets edge, and light doesn’t beckon so much as call. It’s the moment before the leap, before the soul says yes to the unknown. The chemically altered gold, the bleeding rust, the quiet vastness below—these are not just marks on a surface. They are the architecture of becoming.
This work is a visual offering to the mystery of emergence. A reminder that all thresholds are sacred—and the light ahead is never separate from the darkness that shaped us
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