Acrylic
Canvas
48” x 24”
Acrylic on Canvas
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This painting centers around a black sun that dominates the horizon, its radiance stretching outward. From its core, sunrays pierce through the trees and sweep across the canvas, transforming as they travel—first as glowing beams of light, then breaking into jagged lightning bolts that fracture the atmosphere on the right.
A dense tree line rises on the shore of an island off the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, the silhouettes glowing against the black sun’s aura. Below, the water shimmers in soft green tones, carrying the stillness of the scene.
On the left, the world feels expansive, calm, and rooted in nature: the black sun, the luminous water, the silhouetted trees. On the right, the energy fractures into deep blues and shards of lightning, and from this turbulence a face emerges, drifting outward—as if stepping through a passage from another dimension where the familiar begins to dissolve.
The painting becomes an exploration of thresholds—between serenity and chaos, light and fracture, nature and the inner cosmos. The human presence, bound to the landscape, embodies the act of crossing: a spirit caught in emergence, standing at the edge of two realities.
I painted this piece in Tahoe, but it really comes from the year I spent up in British Columbia, off the north end of Vancouver Island. The time I had on the ocean—cruising through the channels on a small fishing boat—left a mark on me. The calm, the power, the endless expanse of water and sky… it all stayed with me. There was one island in particular that always stood out to me: “Steep Islet”.
That memory shaped this painting. The black sun rising behind the treeline, the rays stretching outward and breaking into lightning, the green shimmer of the water—all of it carries that place and that feeling. The face drifting out of the landscape is like a spirit crossing through, a reminder of what it felt like to exist between worlds, standing at the edge of something bigger.
