Breathing Light

Breathing Light

Original charcoal drawing on watercolor paper 190gsm, hand-embellished with genuine gold leaf. 29.7 x 21 cm. Framed and ready to hang. 

This intimate, mixed media portrait captures the stillness between breaths—a moment where the boundary between the physical and the ethereal begins to dissolve. A woman’s face emerges through soft charcoal tones, partially veiled and revealed by delicate fragments of gold leaf that drift across the image like a breeze made visible.

The title Breathing Light speaks to the quiet power of presence—of letting light in, even in the spaces where shadow lingers. The gold is not just decorative; it becomes symbolic—like pieces of clarity or divinity moving across her being. These luminous fragments don’t hide her, they highlight her becoming.

Each mark in charcoal is intentional, yet loose—tracing form without confining it. There’s a rawness here, an honesty in the texture of the paper and the smudged charcoal that contrasts with the clean brilliance of the gold. She is not fully defined, and that’s the point—this is about being in process, in breath, in transformation.

Part of my Unspoken collection, this piece is a meditation on softness as strength, and vulnerability as a path to radiance. Breathing Light is about the quiet, radical act of simply being—of exhaling what no longer serves, and inhaling something brighter.