Butterflies

In this watercolor, I wanted to evoke the quiet truth of impermanence through the delicate presence of butterflies. Their lives unfold in moments — brief, luminous, and impossible to hold — and there’s something about that ephemerality that stays with me. I painted them with soft, translucent washes, allowing the color to drift and dissolve, as if the butterflies were already beginning to fade. Their forms hover lightly on the page, neither fully anchored nor entirely gone, caught in that fragile space between arrival and disappearance.

To me, their impermanence isn’t simply about loss, but about the poignancy of presence — how the most fleeting things often leave the deepest impression. There is a kind of grace in knowing that nothing lasts: it sharpens our attention, deepens our sense of time, and teaches us to find meaning not in permanence, but in presence. With this painting, I wasn’t just trying to depict butterflies, but to hold a mirror to that quiet, inescapable rhythm of change — and to the beauty that flickers within it.