“Believe” arrives at the hour when the visible world loosens its grip and the older one beneath begins to glow. A wisteria, ancient and twice-twisted, holds the center of the canvas, its trunk rising from the dark margin of a still pond into a canopy heavy with bloom. Magenta and rose gather at the crown, while the long racemes descend in violet curtains toward the water, each pendant cluster trailing like a thought too patient to be spoken aloud.
The phenomenon that gives the piece its strange pulse is bioluminescence. Veins of cold blue light run the length of the trunk and gather in the roots, as though the tree had swallowed a portion of the moon and kept it burning within. That same light returns in the water at its feet, doubled and softened, so that the wisteria appears to stand upon its own reflected fire. Above, a slender crescent presides over a sky banked with luminous cloud, an old companion to anyone who has kept watch through the small hours.
Wisteria has long carried meanings that exceed its beauty. In the gardens of the East it stands for longevity and the endurance of devotion, its woody vines outliving the generations that first planted them. The Art Nouveau masters, Tiffany foremost among them, prized its cascading form for the way it dissolved the boundary between architecture and growth. Here the flower serves an older purpose still, marking the place where the seen and the unseen exchange their confidences, where all that hangs downward toward the dark is answered by all that rises upward toward the light.
The title asks little and offers much. Belief, in the sense the painting intends, is the quiet conviction that the dark is never merely the absence of light. The void was never empty. Something has always been waiting within the roots, within the water, within the patient descent of the blossoms, ready to shine for those who hold their gaze long enough to see it.
“Believe” is an original acrylic painting on canvas, eighteen by twenty-four inches. Sold.