The Sky Whispers

THE SKY WHISPERS Acrylic on Canvas | 56" × 66" | 2019

There are places that exist between worlds. This is one of them.

The Sky Whispers is a painting that arrives at dusk and stays through the night. An ancient building — part chapel, part ruin, part memory — sits in a landscape of deep cobalt and teal, its stone rendered in cool grey-blue as if the colour has been slowly drawn out of it by years of standing still. Around it, the ground pools in reflections of violet and rose, as though the earth itself is holding water, or light, or something older than both.

And then there is the tree.

Blazing crimson against a sky of deep purple and indigo, it is the most alive thing in the painting and possibly the most unsettling. It does not belong to any season. It is not on fire — or perhaps it is. It reaches upward into a sky scattered with the faintest points of light, branches spreading like a nervous system, like lightning caught mid-strike, like something that has been waiting a very long time to be noticed.

Above it all the sky shifts from violet to magenta to the deep blue-black of a night that hasn't quite decided to be night yet. It whispers.

This is landscape painting operating at the edge of the knowable — somewhere between the gothic and the sublime, between memory and dream, between what can be seen and what can only be felt. The Sky Whispers is a significant, atmospheric work of considerable scale and ambition.