Invictus

One year of a life, the whole of it, painted onto a single square.

A maximalist watercolour cabinet on black, rendered as an archival fine art print.

Each cabinet here is a diary of one year, and because it is a diary it holds the paintings I made that year, painted in miniature on its shelves. This was the first of them, named for the poem I lived in that year, Henley's Invictus, which is written straight into the shelves.

It rewards looking, because it holds the others. Hung small on its shelves are Still Falling, The Watcher, Making Light and Spoor; the framed dot panel marked O Nata Lux is Prima Materia. Worked in among the bottles as objects, not pictures, are the bowl from Kintsugi and the waking monks of Before the Bell. There is sheet music in it too, Monteverdi's Duo Seraphim, a piece especially dear to me. The whole Henley poem is written in among the labelled bottles: peace, breath, stardust, colour.

A calm woman in deep sun-orange, a textile in her hair, sits near the top. I am in it too, on the right, with short hair. And somewhere a black cat is hiding, the way one hides in every painting I make.

It is painted on black in watercolour, and parts of the surface are crazed to break like glass, a gum-arabic method I worked out myself. The colour is everything I owned that year, turned all the way up against the dark, because the dark is what lets the colour be seen. The original is 22 centimetres square, which makes each of those paintings-within smaller than a fingernail.

The other cabinets feel alive. This one is still, a single year held like a photograph. That is the reason to live with it: a year that happened once, fixed on paper, and will not come again.

Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavyweight 310gsm mould-made fine art paper, acid- and lignin-free to museum standard, with archival pigment inks. A giclée from an original watercolour by Léna Ruisz, never a mass reproduction, colour-managed to stay true to the original painting. Because every screen shows colour a little differently, what you see on your device may vary slightly from the finished print. Free worldwide shipping, arriving ready to live with. No frame is forced on you, so choose the size that fits your wall.

You are buying the fine art print only. The frame shown in the product image, and any mount, furniture, plants or other props in the photographs, are there to show scale and setting. They are not included in your purchase.