The Sea I Have Come Through
acrylics on canvas
imitation gold leaf
116 x 81 cm
sold // 590 €
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the wave that was meant to crush you
will be the wave that’ll lift you higher
(Bethel Music)
Beauty heals. Repairs us. It’s more than just occasional bright moments… I’ve come to think that beauty is a power in itself; deeper than words, stronger than just mere colours, something that tirelessly carves the most important things out of life.
It’s been in my mind a lot lately, this thing with beauty. How sometimes the only voice that gets through is beauty. When my parents fell ill with cancer I had this feeling that the voices I was used to listening to kind of fell silent. I couldn’t get answers the way I was used to; I was shouting with frustration and disappointment but I couldn’t hear God. There were no words.
But then beauty emerged. I still struggle to explain it. It felt like there was this living, breathing quality added to life that I hadn’t been aware of. It’s like… like beauty had been two-dimensional, but suddenly became three-dimensional.
And that beauty had a voice that I was able to hear, and bypassing my rational thinking mind it kind of just went straight to the heart, stroking the shivering and frightened parts of my mind with soothing, reassuring movement, speaking to me of hope, truth, and love.
It’s strange how sometimes nothing else will do than beauty. It’s strange how sometimes words just can’t do it.
The way I see it… I feel God started speaking a new language to me, something completely different. Something that bypassed my broken notions of him and of life. And that beauty heals.
You know how when someone faces heart breaking sorrow and when we don’t have words we give them flowers? There’s something in beauty that has the capacity to heal. I think this is becoming the thing I’m helplessly in love with; the truth I’m running after. Beauty heals. Beauty speaks of hope. Hope is from God. The world is broken. So we need beauty.
Truest beauty is not merely an aesthetic experience. There are things that are too beautiful to explain; like when someone gives a home to an abandoned child, or when the fear of rejection is lifted, or when someone surrenders to love, or when someone sacrifices something dear to them for the sake of others. Truest beauty is in the things that meet the deep needs of the world. That the heart just knows as… true.
The moments where this world and the next cut into each other.
Those things cannot be put properly to words, and cannot be painted into colours. But that kind of beauty keeps me moving. We have just words and colours, and they’ll never be enough, but we can try. I think that’s what I’d love to do. To try to learn this language of beauty, as well as I can. Slowly. Over time.
This is a painting I finished this past week; it’s called The Sea I Came Through. I’ve been thinking about these song lyrics while painting it: the lyrics say that “the wave that was meant to crush you will be the wave that’ll lift you higher”. Sometimes there’s unexpected beauty in the things that feel the hardest; sometimes beauty comes through when we least expect it. Sometimes what was hard and nearly killed us opens a door to something we couldn’t have reached otherwise.