Oil on canvas, 18” x 10” plus frame size.

Framed to Guild of Framers Museum Standard.

This exquisite painting masterfully captures the moment of intense anticipation the muse feels as she awaits the touch of her lover. The way the fabrics drape and slide across her body conveys a sense of heightened sensitivity and electric energy, as if she is a powerful storm on the verge of breaking free.

She is keenly aware that the mere touch of a single finger against her delicate skin acts as the catalyst, triggering a cascade of events. This gentle contact seems to shatter invisible barriers, disrupting the age-old equilibrium, causing the heavens to burst forth with a torrential downpour of warm, rhythmic rain. The air crackles with electricity, the storm drawing closer on that humid summer evening.

As I painted this work I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, ‘It Is Marvellous To Wake Up Together’.

This poem was not printed during Bishop’s life but was discovered among her personal papers after her death. It’s a love poem, which is somewhat uncharacteristic as Bishop did not typically focus on romantic love in her poetry.

Entirely characteristic, though, is Bishop’s power of vision.

It is marvellous to wake up together

At the same minute; marvellous to hear

The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,

To feel the air clear

As if electricity had passed through it

From a black mesh of wires in the sky.

All over the roof the rain hisses,

And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;

It is the prickling air that wakes us up.

If lightning struck the house now, it would run

From the four blue china balls on top

Down the roof and down the rods all around us,

And we imagine dreamily

How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning

Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view

Of night and lying flat on one’s back

All things might change equally easily,

Since always to warn us there must be these black

Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise

The world might change to something quite different,

As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,

Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.