This isn’t really about war.
It’s about what stays after everything stops.
The silence that follows the last breath,
or the one that fills a room when no one’s listening.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about absence.
About that quiet space between expression and erasure
when you’re still creating,
but some part of you feels like it’s fading with each piece.
I keep returning to Rembrandt and Goya.
Not to honor them,
but to learn from how they looked at the world.
How Rembrandt used light like a voice.
How Goya faced death without flinching.
They’ve shaped how I see, not what I paint.
And maybe this piece…
maybe it’s not really about soldiers.
Maybe it’s about trying to hold onto something
when the world feels far away.
Maybe it’s about the artist,
standing alone in a room
filled with everything he couldn’t say.