A story like the wind

Stories move through us like wind through acacia branches—invisible yet undeniably present, shaping everything they touch.

The human psyche is not a static terrain but a living ecosystem where narratives rise and fall like weather systems. We are born into stories—they form the horizon of our earliest understanding. Family mythologies, cultural legends, cautionary tales: these are the first winds that shape the branches of our becoming. The trees in this painting do not resist the atmosphere that surrounds them; they have grown in conversation with it, their very form is a testament to this dialogue.

The stories we tell ourselves are rarely simple; they contain the entire spectrum of experience, from the darkened earth to the radiant sky. As this painting holds both darkness and light in necessary tension, so too do our most powerful stories carry this duality.

The bushmen understood what modern psychology now confirms—that narrative is not merely decorative but foundational to human consciousness. Our minds organize experience through story much as these silhouetted trees organize space against the luminous backdrop. Without this structure, both landscape and psyche would dissolve into undifferentiated sensation.

The vertical striations in this African sky remind us that stories are not merely horizontal progressions from beginning to end, but vertical connections between earth and heaven, conscious and unconscious, known and unknown. They are the ladders by which we climb between realms of understanding.

In the bushveld, change is constant—abundance follows drought, day follows night, this painting, with its liminal light and sentinel trees, captures that moment of transition when one story gives way to another. It reminds us that even as darkness gathers, luminosity persists—and that our capacity to create new narratives remains our most profound freedom.

Like wind moving across the savanna, stories cannot be held or owned. They can only be experienced, shared, and allowed to move through us, leaving us—inevitably, wonderfully—transformed.

88cm x 64cm

Oil on paper