The Sunrise Always Reaches the Flowers First
Dimensions: 56×76 cm
Medium: Sennelier oil pastel on Arches Oil paper
Price: €1,100
This work exists in a state of attentive quietude. The yellow flowers in the foreground do not scream; they simply are. They receive the light because they have positioned themselves where the light reaches. There is no effort, no competition with the dense vegetation behind them. There is only presence.
The technique of Sennelier oil pastel on Arches Oil paper creates accumulating layers. The greens breathe among one another—some opaque, others translucent, none struggling for dominance. The vertical strokes suggest organic growth, unhurried. The sky remains discreet, almost absent, because it does not need to assert its vastness; it is simply there.
The flowers (echinaceas and rudbeckias) serve as an anchor point, but not a point of control. They do not organize the composition; they inhabit it. They are small sentinels of the morning, silent witnesses to the moment when the light first touches what is most exposed, most vulnerable, most available.
There are no rigid horizon lines. Sky, vegetation, and ground merge into a continuum where everything coexists without hierarchy. No element needs to impose itself upon another to exist fully. It is a visual ecology of interdependence; each layer sustains the next without suffocating it.
The title carries a simple truth: the flowers receive first because they are where they are. They did not hide in the protective density of the bushes. They accepted the margin, the exposure, the fragility. And so, when the light arrives, the first rays reach them first.
