The day comes we come to the day 2026 – 170 x 136cm, oil and acrylic on canvas
The title is from Samuel Beckett’s How It is, and it describes an arrival that is also a convergence: the day doesn’t simply come, we come to meet it, the movement mutual, the threshold approached from both sides simultaneously. The painting is that threshold, the precise atmospheric moment between night and dawn when the dark still holds its ground and the light is no longer absent.
A yellow horizon pushes upward into deep cobalt blue. The day is arriving from below, not yet here, displacing the night that occupies the lower zones of the canvas with the patience of something that has been there longest and knows it will remain. Between these two absolute conditions, the blue above, the black below, an enclosure holds the painting’s central world: a tilted plane dense with flowers, each distinct, each present with the full weight of individual existence gathered into a collective that the series has been building toward across thirteen years.
At this scale the flowers are encountered rather than observed. The blue anemone backlit by yellow, theatrical, almost impossible, is the most concentrated dramatic moment the series has produced. Around it, a population of blooms in various states of resolution: spiral roses, ranunculus forms, a pink disc, a yellow tulip, an orange presence, the dark impasto mass that has been accumulating through the recent paintings now sitting among the flowers as a presence among presences rather than an obstacle to them. The container has become a theatre, an assembly, the most complete statement the series has made of the flower as collective witness.
A lime-green curved form sweeps from the right down through the lower canvas, part ramp, part wave, part architectural section, connecting the container’s world to what lies below it, giving the painting a vertical movement that distributes its energy across the full height of the canvas. Below the threshold, in the absolute dark that the day has not yet reached, a single pink rose. Alone. In the space that was not planned for it. Waiting for the light that is coming from both directions simultaneously.
The day comes. We come to the day. The rose in the dark is already there.