Dawn Of Wishes I

Title: Dawn Of Wishes I    
Dimensions: 90 x 110 cm    
Medium: Charcoal On Ivory Paper    
Style: Hyperrealistic Surrealism    
Year: 2025    
Characteristic: Unique Selling Proposition, Certificate of Authenticity, Unframed

Meaning:

There is a feeling that has no clean name. It is not sadness, and it is not joy. It lives somewhere in the quiet hours before morning—when the heart is too tired to grieve but too alive to stop hoping. That feeling is what this work is about.

She does not ask for much. She simply waits—with the kind of waiting that has learned patience not by choice, but by necessity. Her eyes do not plead. They hold. They carry the particular stillness of someone who has whispered her wishes so many times into the dark that the words have become a kind of prayer—not loud, not desperate, just steady. Something better is coming. It has to be.

Behind her, the fabric does not rest. It rises and churns and folds over itself in great billowing waves—because the mind of someone living in hope is never truly quiet. Her thoughts are enormous: the dreams not yet spoken aloud, the plans that keep rearranging themselves, the fears dressed up as possibilities. But look closely—that same chaos has the power to lift her. Those thoughts, once they find their moment, will become wings.

And still, through all of it, she holds on. Not to ambition. Not to status. But to the people and the small, real things that remind her she is valued—not useful, not tolerated, but truly valued. That distinction means everything when the world outside offers so little tenderness.

The hummingbirds rest beside her like quiet witnesses—creatures that survive by finding sweetness in the most unlikely places, that beat their wings faster than the eye can follow just to remain still. They are her. They are so many of us.

This is the portrait of African youth that rarely gets painted—not struggle rendered for spectacle, not triumph curated for inspiration—but the honest, aching, beautiful in-between. The dawn that has not yet broken, but that you can already feel warming the edge of the sky.

She is waiting. But she has not stopped believing.