In March of this year, I left a career in civil engineering to become a full time artist, with no plan B. It was now or never, and there’s no blueprint for a decision like that. The first few months felt like free fall, the certainty of a paycheck and a title gone, replaced by nothing but the work itself.
Not long after, a triptych I’d painted won the Abstract Horizons exhibition. It wasn’t my first recognition as an artist, but it was the first since I’d bet everything on this path, and it felt like a quiet answer to the question I hadn’t stopped asking myself. Maybe I hadn’t made a mistake.
That win became the seed for this series. Five paintings, three weeks, each one tracing a stage of that year: the leap, the free fall, being doubted again as I started over from nothing, the slow work of building a new career with no instructions to follow, and finally, where I stand now. Not arrived, still becoming, but no longer afraid of being unfinished.
Every piece in this series carries the engineering pages I once drafted other people’s structures on, collaged into the canvas itself, my past discipline folded into a new one I’m still learning.
The Space I Made
That win became the seed for this whole series, and this is the first piece I made once I let myself believe I could build a real career this way. Gold leaf, deliberate geometry, structure built up with intention rather than left to chance. There was no blueprint for starting over at this scale, so I drew my own, layer by layer, the way I once drew blueprints for buildings that were never mine to keep.
- Original mixed media finished with oil painting on 101cmx76cm canvas.
- Signed & comes with certificate of authenticity.
- Varnished and ready to hang.
