Oblivious and Untold Abstract Art Series: Inward
On Going Still When the World Carries On.
Think of still water. Not the dramatic stillness of a frozen lake in winter, though that is part of it. The quieter kind, a pond on a windless afternoon, a harbour at low tide, a puddle on a grey morning that reflects the sky so perfectly you could almost believe the world has doubled. The surface is unreadable. Smooth, closed, giving nothing away. And beneath it, invisible to anyone passing by, everything is still moving. Still feeling. Still alive with whatever lives down there in the dark and the deep.
That is what withdrawal looks like from the outside. Calm. Contained. Ordinary, even. The world looks at you and sees a surface. It does not see what is happening underneath.
After something cuts through, as the first painting in this series explores, there is a period that follows which is harder to name than the moment itself. The moment was sharp and clear. This is neither. This is the going inward. The quiet, almost involuntary retreat from the surface of things. You are still there. You are still moving through your days, still speaking when spoken to, still present in all the ways the world requires you to be present. But something in you has pulled back. Gone deep. Made itself small and still in a place where nothing else can reach it.
It is not a choice, exactly. Nobody decides to withdraw. It happens the way water finds its own level, naturally, quickly, without announcement. Something happens that you cannot yet process, cannot yet speak about, cannot yet bring to the surface without it overwhelming everything around it. And so you take it down. You carry it inward. You close the surface over it nd let the world see only the reflection of the sky.
What is remarkable about this kind of withdrawal is how invisible it is to the people around you. They see the still surface and assume stillness all the way down. They do not know, cannot know, unless you tell them, that beneath the ordinary surface you are presenting to the world, something is turning slowly in the deep. Something that has no words yet. Something that is still trying to understand what happened and why it landed the way it did and what it means for everything that comes after.
And the person who caused it, the one whose word or act or silence made the original cut, they especially do not know. They see the same surface everyone else sees. Perhaps they notice nothing at all. Perhaps they think everything is fine, that whatever passed between you passed without leaving a mark. They are still on the surface, moving at the ordinary pace of things. They have no idea you have gone somewhere they cannot follow.
There is something both painful and strangely protective about this kind of inwardness. Painful because you are alone with it, completely, privately alone in a way that is hard to describe to anyone who has not felt it.
Protective because the deep is also safe. Nothing else can reach what you have taken down there. The surface holds. And in the holding, slowly, without rushing, something begins, not healing exactly, not yet, but the first tentative movement toward understanding. The beginning of knowing what you are carrying and what it will ask of you.
The painting for this post tries to hold that quality, the closed surface, the depth beneath, the muted palette of a world seen from the inside. It is the quietest painting in the series. The most interior. It does not ask to be understood from the outside. It asks only to be sat with, the way you sit with still water, patiently, without demanding that it gives up what lies beneath.
Have you ever gone inward after something happened, closed the surface over it, carried it somewhere private and deep, while the world continued around as if nothing had changed?
What did it feel like to hold something that nobody else could see? And was there a part of you, in that stillness, that was also somehow safe?
This is the second painting and blog post in the series Oblivious and Untold, five acrylic abstract paintings and a reflection drawn from a previous blog, Painting Your Feelings.
The first post, The Cut, is also available to read. More paintings and posts will follow soon. This series accompanies an earlier series, Between Two Points, which is also available on this blog.
