Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. Some of the hardest things we receive in life do not reveal their meaning immediately. They arrive as loss, disappointment, silence, or pain, and for a long time, we can only wonder why we had to endure them. Yet darkness has its own way of teaching. It forces us inward, into places we might never have entered by choice. It makes us question what we believed, confront what we avoided, and slowly discover a strength we did not know we possessed. Perhaps some lessons can only be understood through struggle. The darkness is not always something we are meant to escape; sometimes, it is the place where we learn to see. And what once felt like a wound may, with time, become a gift, the difficult passage through which we came to understand ourselves more deeply.

Provenance

Created in the artist’s Paris studio in 2022, this work is painted in traditional egg tempera and presented in an antique frame. It has been exhibited in Paris.