Some paintings begin with a colour. Others begin with a feeling. Silent Forest began with slate.
The Spark
I’ve always been drawn to the patterns you find in slate — the way it fractures and layers, the way light catches its surface differently depending on the angle, the way it holds the memory of time and pressure within its grain. There’s something deeply honest about slate. It doesn’t try to be beautiful. It simply is.
Standing in front of a blank canvas, I wanted to capture that same quality — that sense of texture born from the earth itself — and let it travel upward. From the ground, through the roots, up through the trunks, into the canopy, and finally dissolving into sky.
Nature as One
What emerged was Silent Forest — a panoramic landscape where the boundary between earth and sky becomes fluid. The same textures that define the ground reappear in the tree bark, in the branches, in the atmosphere above. Vivid colour pulses through the layers — gold catching where light would catch on wet slate, blue-grey shifting like cloud and stone at once.
It was an exploration of how nature doesn’t separate itself into neat categories. The ground feeds the tree. The tree reaches for the sky. The sky holds them both. In Silent Forest, I wanted that unity to be felt as much as seen.
The Making
The painting is built up in thick impasto layers — acrylic applied with palette knives and tools that mimic the very textures that inspired it. Up close, the surface is almost geological. Step back, and the forest emerges.
At 145cm wide, it’s designed to fill a wall the way a forest fills a horizon.
Silent Forest is an original, one-of-a-kind artwork — framed and ready to hang. View it in the studio.