Abstract Acrylic Painting

This painting began as most honest things do, with a feeling. Mono no aware, the Japanese notion of "the pathos of things," speaks to a gentle, aching awareness that everything beautiful is also passing. I have carried that awareness for a long time, and one day the weight of it needed somewhere to go. It went into this canvas. Why the Title? Mono no aware is not grief or despair. It is the catch in your breath when the last light of evening disappears behind a ridge, or the way you hold a letter from someone who is no longer here. It is the recognition that impermanence is not the enemy of beauty — it is the very thing that makes beauty unbearable and necessary.

I chose this title because the painting is not about any single thing that passes. It is about the passing itself, and the tenderness we feel when we allow ourselves to notice it. At the heart of this artwork is a vast, luminous field of pale cyan — an open, breathing expanse that reads as water, as sky, as the sheer spaciousness of being alive. It dominates the centre of the canvas like a held breath. Around it, darker currents of navy and ultramarine pool along the bottom edge and press inward from the left, pulling the eye downward into depth. A diagonal channel of burgundy and maroon cuts through the composition like a tributary — or a wound — drawing a line from the upper centre toward the lower left, as if life itself were flowing somewhere it cannot return from. Rivulets of colour branch and merge throughout. The paint was allowed to move as water moves, finding its own path. Crimson bleeds into the upper corners and along the right edge like memory surfacing unbidden — vivid, warm, impossible to contain. Small accents of yellow glow quietly in the lower right, steady as lanterns on a distant shore. The boundary between the pale blue and the surrounding darkness shimmers like a waterline or a horizon — the place where what we can see meets what we can only feel. Technique: I built this painting through a hybrid process of acrylic fluid pour, deliberate gestural mark-making, and layered transparency. Over and beneath these poured passages, I introduced sgraffito and fine scratched lines, where delicate, feathery marks suggest something spectral. In the upper left, a lattice of cyan lines overlays deeper reds, evoking coral branches, skeletal structures, or the frame of a torii gate half-submerged in time. There are drips along the right edge where red paint was allowed to run freely. The layering of transparent washes beneath more opaque applications creates a sense of bioluminescence — light not falling on the surface but rising from within it. Multiple viscosities of paint sit side by side: watery stains next to thicker, impasto ridges where colours met and could not resolve. The Viewer: I want the viewer to stand before this painting and feel the pull of two things at once: stillness and motion, serenity and turbulence, the calm of that central blue and the restless energy pressing at its edges. The biomorphic forms — shell-like fans, silhouettes, suggestions of life — are never quite literal. They hover at the edge of recognition, the way a half-remembered dream does. I want the viewer to sense the underwater, the oceanic, the feeling of being held inside something vast and indifferent and beautiful. And

I want them to notice that nothing in this painting holds a firm boundary. Every form is dissolving into the next. Every colour is in the process of becoming something else. That is the point. There are paintings you make and paintings that make themselves through you. This one was closer to the second kind. I painted it during a period when I was acutely aware of time — not in the abstract, philosophical way, but in the way you become aware of it when someone you love is changing, or a place you belong to is disappearing, or you catch sight of your own face and realise it is not the face you expected. Mono no aware gave me a name for what I was feeling: not sadness exactly, but a tenderness so sharp it was almost joy. The flowing paint, the surrendered control, the colours that bled and merged without my permission — all of it became a way of saying what I could not say in words. That everything I love is temporary. That I love it anyway. That the loving and the losing may, in the end, be the same gesture.

Reem H. Sultan is an Abu Dhabi based contemporary painter whose richly textured abstract works explore the fluid intersections of femininity, inner strength, and organic movement. Through a masterfully layered use of oils, acrylics, and resin, she translates the complexities of human emotion into evocative compositions that invite deep introspection while balancing a unique sense of power and calm.

NOTE: The image shown is a close up image of the Painting. The 2nd image shows the full painting, with the following images showcasing closeups of the artwork, detailing the work done by the artist.

Painting is signed by the artist

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Mono No Aware