Verdoyant is my ode to Paris, a city that has never once fallen short of the dream I carried of it. It feels almost improbable, the way it lives up to its own legend.

This painting gathers those impressions and folds them into a single, shifting face. Shades of green move across the surface like memories layered over time, deep and bright, familiar yet always changing. Fragments of paper, music, and pattern echo the rhythm of the city itself, where art, history, and daily life sit side by side without effort. Some of these papers carry their own quiet story, found in Paris in a discarded wallpaper sample book, as if the city had left behind pieces of itself to be gathered and given new life.

The world is not a surface but a construction of moments; Cubism simply refuses to hide the seams.

I’ve been there twice so far, each visit a gift in its own way. The first came unexpectedly, an invitation to a business conference that felt like chance opening a door. The second was slower, softer, a family holiday filled with shared moments and unhurried days. Both times, the city met me with the same quiet certainty, as if it had been waiting all along.

The cubist elements are a quiet nod to the movement that took shape in Paris in the early twentieth century, where artists began to see the world not as a single view, but as many at once. Here, that spirit lingers in the angles and planes, a way of holding more than one memory, more than one feeling, in the same space.

To see fully is to accept contradiction: the front and the back, the before and the after, held in a single breath.

This is the first in a series of paintings I’ve begun after a long pause in my life as an artist. In many ways, it marks a return and a shift. This piece has opened a new way of seeing for me, of breaking things apart and reimagining them on the canvas. I look forward to sharing more work that grows from this moment, and that might invite others to reconnect with their own sense of curiosity, memory, and creative instinct.

LD