“The Garden Of Hypnos”
Series Overview:
In this body of work, you wander through a fictional Eden that shifts with the hours of the day. A garden where sleep, myth, memory, and metamorphosis fold into one another. Moving from midnight to morning, each work illuminates a different tableau within the night garden: the stillness of sleep, the ache of transformation, the sweetness of last light, and the quiet divinity of relics and keepsakes.
The journey begins at midnight in The Garden of Hypnos, a moonlit dreamscape thick with the perfume of night-blooming flowers and soporific petals. From there, the path leads deeper into the night with Growing Pains, a meditation on metamorphosis inspired by the myth of Daphne, whose body blossoms into a tree to escape Apollo’s pursuit. As night gives way to dawn, the veil lifts in The Sweetest Taste Is Just Before Dawn, where two bats take their final sip of nectar as the sun spills over the horizon.
The garden continues into daylight through two miniature works encased in antique frames: a morning relic, Janan, a maternal memento adorned with enameled day-blooms, and Garden Gaze, a pair of turquoise eyes suspended within a gilded floral frame, closing the journey with the warmth of sunset.
As you drift through this garden, time dilates. Flowers breathe. Creatures guide. Relics glimmer like jeweled fruits of Eden. This garden is not a place we return to, but a place that returns to us: in scent, in memory, and in dreams.
Color / Flower Charts
Midnight:
“The Garden of Hypnos”
Acrylic on Wood Panel
60 x 80 cm x 2 cm
2025
Born from an olfactory experience, this vision arrived when I first smelled Serge Lutens’ À La Nuit. Its nocturnal, layered notes opened into a vivid image. A garden veiled in midnight, the air dense with fragrance. I followed the trail of the perfume, researching night blooms, why they open only in darkness, and how they call to their pollinators, bats and moths, with scent rather than color.
In Greek mythology, Hypnos is the god of sleep and dreams, brother to Thanatos, god of death, and son of Nyx and Erebus, night and darkness.
In this painting, the garden becomes Hypnos’ sanctuary. A wild shrubbery of moonflowers, tuberoses, night jasmines, primroses, orchids, lilies, and queen-of-the-night cacti unfolds around a sleeping figure. Plants steeped in sedative, lucid, and hallucinogenic properties, blue lotus, ghost plant, silene capensis, mugwort, passionflower, and many more, adorn the composition. Tiny fairies perch on mushrooms or ride on the backs of bats and moths. Behind them, the sea glimmers beneath a full moon.
This is a sanctuary of surrender, a place where scent becomes spell, and sleep becomes passage.
Deep Night:
“Growing Pains”
Acrylic on wood panel
40 x 30 x 2 cm
2025
Inspired by the myth of Daphne and Apollo, this painting captures a pivotal moment where transformation becomes salvation. In the ancient tale, Daphne prays for escape from Apollo’s relentless pursuit, and her body answers by turning into a laurel tree to protect herself, a metamorphosis born from necessity.
Growing Pains reimagines that moment not through fear but through the quiet resilience of becoming. A single hand, caught mid-transformation, reaches upward as branches sprout from flesh, a symbol of how life sometimes forces us to grow before we feel ready.
Metamorphosis here is both ache and blessing, a reminder that we bloom at the pace of our own survival. It is a portrait of accelerated becoming: painful, tender, inevitable, and ultimately liberating.
Sunrise:
“The Sweetest Taste Is Just Before Dawn”
Acrylic on wood panel
30 x 40 x 2 cm
2025
At the cusp of dawn, when the night veil lifts, two bats share their final taste of nectar from an agave bloom. The last pollination before the inevitable parting of wings. A quiet finale in the breath between darkness and daybreak.
This painting is an ode to endings: an invitation to savor what is fleeting, to take in the sweetness while it lasts, to enjoy the last sip before the dream dissolves into daylight.
Morning:
“Janan”
Acrylic on canvas, set inside a Christian Dior Haute Couture early-2000s brass and hand-painted enamel floral frame necklace
36 x 16.5 x 0.8 cm
2023
This work carries the tenderness of morning. A painting set within a rare Dior Haute Couture necklace, Janan holds a portrait of my mother at its center, her face encircled by a wreath of day blooms, clipped butterfly wings, and brass filigree. The frame becomes an heirloom, a wearable relic turned sanctuary, where memory is cradled in enamel and fauna.
Sunset:
“Garden Gaze”
Acrylic on canvas, set inside a 19th-century Austro-Hungarian double portrait frame in pressed brass plated with 24k gold, with hand-painted white enamel, garnets, and turquoise
12 x 8.5 x 0.7 cm
2025
As the sun sets, two turquoise eyes peer through the ornate windows of this antique double portrait frame, their color echoing the enamel and stones surrounding them. The frame. floral, gilded, and opulent, feels like a relic from an imagined Eden where jewels grow like fruit. The palette of gold, garnet, and turquoise carries the warmth of sunset, making this piece the final passage in the garden’s journey. Garden Gaze watches over the sea of the fading day, holding its last light in its eyes. Waiting for the night garden to awaken once more.
