Sara Barbin
The Garden of the Seven Flower’s, Acrylic on canvas, 30x 40 cm, 2025.
Retrograde Thunderstorm, Acrylic on canvas, 30x 40 cm, 2025.
STATEMENT
These two paintings—The Garden of the Seven Flowers and Retrograde Thunderstorm—are visual responses to the sensation of late summer.
Not the soft kind, but the dense, unmoving days when heat presses inward, and time feels suspended but emotionally loaded.
Both were made in that liminal stretch—when the world is saturated, and something beneath the surface begins to shift.
They aren’t literal landscapes, but emotional ones.
The Garden of the Seven Flowers leans diagonally,
pushed from lower shadow into angled light.
The flowers aren’t arranged; they tilt, overlap, and tangle.
Seven emerged, not as symbols, but as rhythm—like memories arriving out of order.
Each bloom feels slightly fading.
The palette is thick with tension: red that verges on rust, dark grey with too much weight,
and purples that feel dusk-soaked.
Nothing is calm. It’s a garden caught mid-transition,
holding stillness only because motion hasn’t fully begun.
There’s a physical pressure in the way the forms lean,
as if pulled by something beyond the canvas edge.
It’s the kind of beauty that signals a shift—
not yet visible, but unmistakably coming.
Retrograde Thunderstorm builds from beneath.
Dark layers push upward—thick, slow, and deliberate.
The clouds don’t roll in; they surface,
rising like submerged thought or buried feeling.
Amid those layers, spiral forms emerge—
part vortex, part tree. They twist up from the base,
both organic and ominous, suggesting storm and root, turbulence and grounding.
There’s no lightning, no break—only sustained weight.
The brushwork repeats and resists,
holding the sky in a state of suspended pressure.
Color deepens with each pass: charcoal, ink, tarnish, shadow, glimpses of gold.
Together, the two paintings form an atmosphere of heavy memories, when nothing has ended or started yet.
Garden is motion beginning; Thunderstorm is weight rising.
Both are about sensation over story—
what it feels like when the world holds its breath.
They are rooted in memory,
but not the kind you can explain.
More like scent, or temperature,
or the strange stillness at the end of a summer day
when you realize everything is already changing.
Sara Barbin @empress_drawings