The First Swan

I didn’t decide that swans would become a motif, or a signature, or a language I would return to. I simply noticed them — the way they moved through Hyde Park Lake as if the world had slowed to accommodate them.

There was something almost unsettling about their stillness. Not passive, not fragile — but deliberate. As if they knew exactly where they were meant to be.

At the time, I was searching. For direction, for discipline, for proof that devotion to beauty could still mean something in a world that rewards speed and noise. I didn’t yet have answers. I only had attention.

The Hyde Park Lake swans appeared again and again. On quiet mornings. On grey afternoons. Sometimes alone, sometimes paired. Always composed. Always returning to the same water.

When I painted that first swan, I wasn’t trying to capture realism. I was trying to preserve a feeling — a moment suspended between waking and dreaming. The pale curve of the neck, the softness of white against muted water, the sense that time had loosened its grip.

Looking back, I see now why it had to be a swan.

Swans are not hurried. They don’t explain themselves. They don’t ask to be understood. Their beauty is inseparable from discipline — from repetition, from returning, from inhabiting the same space until it becomes theirs.

That painting marked the beginning of something quieter but more demanding: a commitment to showing up, even when no one was watching. To painting not for attention, but for alignment.

The Hyde Park swans didn’t change.I did.

This journal begins there — with that first swan — and follows the slow, deliberate act of becoming. Through studio practice, observation, doubt, and devotion. Through moments that feel borrowed from a dream, and the work that anchors them into something real.

Yours,

Georgia