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There is a moment—fleeting, wordless—when the brush meets paper and something beyond me takes over. I don’t plan it, and I don’t polish it. I simply respond. And then, I stop. Not because the work is finished in the traditional sense, but because something tells me to stop. A quiet authority, invisible and holy, says: enough.

I’ve learned to trust that voice. To trust that what may appear incomplete to others carries its own truth, its own rhythm. I’ve learned that not knowing where a painting is going is sometimes the only honest way to paint. Each stroke I leave untouched feels like a whispered memory of something that passed through me. I dare not change it unless that unseen energy—whatever name we give it—moves me again.

When I paint quickly, instinctively, often within two or three minutes, something raw surfaces. Joy, sorrow, hesitation, hope—they all rise to the surface without me interfering. These works, painted on humble sheets of paper, are often the ones closest to my heart. They’re alive with the very moment I was in, not a reconstruction of it.

But when I paint on canvas, everything changes. The material itself demands time, layers, effort. And so I stay with it longer than I should. I start making decisions, adjustments, trying to get it “right.” Somewhere along the way, the painting becomes a stranger. Rationality takes over, and I lose the thread of what first moved me to begin. I still try. Sometimes I even finish a canvas and look at it with satisfaction. But it rarely feels like mine.

That’s why I’ve come to accept the unfinished—not as failure, but as truth. A painting doesn’t need to resolve itself to speak. Sometimes it’s the unresolved, the silent, the open-ended gestures that carry the most weight. There is courage in leaving things incomplete, in resisting the urge to explain or perfect. There is beauty in letting things breathe.

In a world obsessed with outcomes, it feels radical to say: I don’t know where this is going, but I trust it anyway.