“Standing Still” began with a photo a friend gave me, taken at the city of Famagusta in Cyprus. A statue of a woman, still and upright. Her silence louder than the landscape around her. She stands there, grounded, as if she has always known the weight of time.
In the background, there’s a pile of plastic chairs. The kind we’ve all leaned back in, letting the sun catch our skin. They seem like they don’t belong there. Or maybe they do. Maybe they’ve always been there, in another shape. The present cluttered around the past. The ordinary pressing itself into the eternal. A quiet collision of then and now.
This painting came out slowly, over the course of three months, a constant battle, thinking about what stays, what shifts, what gets erased. What we carry with us without knowing. A statue, a chair, the landscape, the sun. The island itself.