This painting, 'She Was Standing There', captures a hauntingly quiet yet powerfully surreal moment—a woman caught between stillness and motion, vulnerability and resilience. Set against the vast emptiness of “nowhere,” the composition is stark: a lone figure waits at the edge of a highway, suspended in time. She wears an eye patch—an immediate sign of hardship or survival—and clutches a couple of worn bags, her belongings condensed into a few precious items.
The landscape is sparse but striking. The sky is clear, awash with the fresh, clean light of spring. The air feels crisp, the sunlight casting soft shadows that stretch along the asphalt. There are no cars. No houses. No signs. Just her, and the road.
What gives the painting its emotional gravity is the tension it evokes. The absurdity of the scene—a person so clearly out of place in such an empty, transitional space—commands attention. It confronts the viewer with unspoken questions: Where is she going? Where has she come from? Her presence is an intrusion on the ordinary, turning a mundane roadside moment into a quietly profound encounter.
For me, the artist, this moment was a sudden flare of awareness—a flash of consciousness that interrupted the flow of daily life. She crossed not just the road but my perception, shifting something inward. The inability to help her or understand her story left a mark, a kind of existential itch that found its resolution only in art. Painting her allowed me to hold onto that moment, to process its strange weight, to dignify her presence in a way reality wouldn’t allow.
The influence on me was layered: aesthetic, emotional, philosophical. The scene may have appeared absurd, but in that absurdity was a fragile kind of truth—the kind that art is uniquely suited to preserve. The painting isn’t just a record of what I saw, but a mirror of what it made me feel: awareness, discomfort, empathy, beauty. And perhaps, most powerfully, the humbling realisation that not all stories are ours to solve—some are only ours to witness.