Celestial Orb

​I filmed the sun’s reflection on a river; the orb morphed and danced across the surface, and I was immediately awe-struck. From still frames I made four watercolour studies of the transformation, then reworked one in graphite and charcoal, showing the sun breaking into three orbs.
This image became the basis for a five-foot oil on canvas, Celestial Orb in Water, so titled because the reflected globe reads as both sun and moon.
All preparatory studies were made with my left hand. As a dyslexic artist, I read this as a deliberate echo of ‘reversals’: working with my non-dominant hand and privileging a globe-like, big-picture (holistic) form.

Accordingly, the work courts the sublime: the orb appears as a phantom—visible yet untouchable—so the image is felt as much as seen. As a reflection, it is itself a reversal—an inverted double that extends the motif of reversals in my practice. For me as a dyslexic artist, such reversals echo everyday literacy difficulties—letters, numbers or words appearing ‘back to front’—often treated as a disadvantage; in the studio, however, that same tendency becomes an aesthetic resource, where inversion and doubling create ambiguity, estrangement and, at times, awe.



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Celestial Orb. Graphite on paper. 50x50cm. 2024


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Celestial Orb. Oil on five feet canvas. 2025.