Layers of Becoming

The Silence Before Form

Layers of Becoming reflects on the unseen stages of creation, the layers that form beneath the surface before beauty takes shape.

Can you see the beauty in lines imperfect, sculpted over time? These are the moments of quiet devotion to your soul’s calling.

Inspired by the Dutch pour that became the foundation from which Dreamy Vesuvius emerged, everything rises from the echoes of that first flow. This piece honours the imperfect gestures, the moments of letting go, and the quiet courage it takes to begin. In the movement of molten colour, iridescent sapphire hues meeting speckled gold, the pour became a reminder that all art, or any new beginning, asks for surrender. Nothing starts perfect. Every current, every revision, every pause is part of the making.

The Making

In Waves of Silk, I wrote, “I’m not a painter. But only I could paint her.”

That reflection on Dreamy Vesuvius was never about mastery, it was about the process of making. She was the story seeking a vessel through which to be told. She arrived the moment I accepted that I wanted to give her form, even without knowing how. I realised that imperfection has its own kind of grace. What I did not know then was that her story had begun long before the first line, in currents that moved before the Dutch pour, in a dream, a vision, a quiet inspiration waiting to surface.

Origins

Before a form finds its shape, there is movement.
Before stillness, there is fire.

Layers of Becoming returns to the place where covellite was first named by its founder, the Italian mineralogist Niccolò Covelli, beneath the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, where molten earth met the waters of the Bay of Naples and cooled into iridescent stone. It is here, in this elemental meeting, that the language of covellite was forged through fire, beauty through resilience. I chose the Dutch pour not to leave it as it was, but to capture that same lava flow in its early form, the pour becoming the landscape from which Dreamy Vesuvius would rise.

Medium Interplay

When I began painting, I found the same dialogue between fire and sea, how one resists while the other yields. The Dutch pour became my own volcano, a quiet eruption on canvas. Gold moved through blue like molten rock meeting tide, and I learned again that creation is not about control but about listening to what wants to take shape. Sometimes the most humbling thing we can do is step aside and let the elements move through us.

The Lesson

As the paint flowed, I tried to guide it, too much control and the movement would lose its momentum. That is the beauty of the pour, the colours drifted in myriad ways, teaching me what Vesuvius already knew, that beauty often forms through what we cannot contain. I was not painting perfection. I was painting surrender. Each layer asked me to release another expectation, to let feeling, not precision, decide where the angle of light or the fold of colour should settle, like a crease of silk.

I watch my son as he creates or learns something new. He rushes to know, to master, to get it right on the first try, as we all once did, taught to fear the wobble of a first line. I remind him that no one begins with mastery. Before a baby speaks its first word, it gurgles and mumbles, testing the sounds of its own discovery.

Over time, I began to see that these lines, whether on a canvas or a face, are the stories we carry. It is what the line “Can you see the beauty in lines imperfect, sculpted over time?” speaks to. Every experience sketches the emergence of what comes next. The smiling wrinkles, the frowning creases, the brushstrokes that refuse to be perfect, all remind us that life’s work is to let what we have lived move us forward. What defines us is our commitment to honouring those lines, not hiding them, each one a carving of time, etched with all we have become.

Dreamy Vesuvius and the Memory of Pompeii

From the river of paint, the landscape from which she emerged took shape. The sketched lines, then the suggestion of shoulders, currents cascading like silk. She was not painted onto the surface; she rose from it, born of gold and blue, a figure shaped by what came before. In her, the lava found its calm, the sea its pulse. Dreamy Vesuvius became the bridge between eruption and stillness, the embodiment of what the mountain itself remembers, that even fire must rest.

I travelled to Pompeii in 2008, walking through chariot-wheel-carved cobblestone streets where silence has its own engraving, dust, stone, and the echo of lives interrupted mid-breath. There was something sacred about that stillness. The way time had folded, the way fresco survived where flesh could not. Standing there, I understood that Vesuvius was not merely a story of destruction, it preserved both the end and the beginning. Through heat and cooling, it formed new land, a blueprint of endurance, a testament to how life continues to shape itself out of what remains.

Depth and Resonance

There is a moment, somewhere between effort and release, when the work begins to mirror you. The paint no longer obeys, and yet it listens. It shows you where you cling, where you trust, where you still fear the unknown. In those moments I am reminded that growth is about allowing every condition I have lived to transition me from what was into what might be. Every brushstroke becomes a conversation with resistance, every pause an act of faith.

And this is the heart of covellite, to shift, to create, to transform. It is a practice, a way of moving through the world with quiet purpose. Every piece begins in this same place, between fire and flow. Where the light flows, is a reflection of how open we are to becoming.

Each collection leaves its own quiet constellation, fragments of origin, colour, form, and memory, tracing the Dreamer’s Journey.

Born from elements,
becoming,
silence.