Only When I Stop

It’s been three months now. Every Tuesday, between 6pm and 7.30pm, the world stops speeding. Even time seems to hold its breath.

My Chinese painting teacher is not tall. His studio space is large. But the whole space is filled with his presence.

We barely use words. Or they do not have the usual meanings.
The room is often filled with silence, even when he speaks.

And that embodied silence feels good. It finds its place inside my heart.

It’s the silence I find in Chinese painting, in Japanese gardens, it’s that cultivation of the non-visible.
It’s the Ma.
It’s the peace I find when I stare at my one bare wall.
It’s when I sit and don’t feel guilty about it.
It’s when I observe my work.
It’s the silence of my thoughts when I truly listen.
It’s what drew me to visit Ħaġar Qim last week.
It’s when I feel that nothing is missing.
It’s the non-tangible.
It’s the invisible.

It’s the negative space I have been cultivating in my recent paintings without being fully aware of it.
It’s the minimum of brush marks to capture the essence of my friend.
It’s the feminine energy that showed up in my Women series.
It’s the meditations I’ve been creating and the ones I’ve been receiving.
It’s the longer exhale in my breathing practices.

It’s what I’ve been receiving and needed to express. A longing for that moment suspended in time.

Sometimes we do, and then we understand why we did.

My doing in the first place reminds me that one can’t exist without the other.
It’s not the rigid planning of the negative space in my composition.
It’s the cultivating of it as my painting evolves.
It’s the pause after a brush stroke.
It’s the step back from my painting after a moment of action.

I’m fascinated by how this balance happens naturally, in its own terms.

If I look at my recent work, final pieces or sketches, I can see the play around this balance.
Is there always a “just right”? Is it a fixed state?
What happens if I change the tone. The composition. The color. The edges.
How do I feel then.
Do I feel on the edge, on the move, slightly off balance.
Do I feel grounded.
Do I feel bored, flat, and numb.
Do I feel excitement.

So I’ve been revisiting that silence in my paintings in progress.
May I admit I even touched paintings I thought were finished.
I might have opened another door. Why the need to change what “was”?
It’s like wanting to change an event that happened in the past instead of learning from it and changing the future one.

Or was it simply not finished?