Past Midnight, Thunder Strikes (Oak at Night 2)

2025, oil on linen, 8 x 10 x 1.5 in, walnut floater frame

You’re looking at an oak lit up in the charged electricity of night, when darkness turns into a stage for what usually goes unseen. Its branches glow with neon undertones that feel like lightning—lines of force running through wood, sky, and air. Stripped of leaves, the tree shows its internal architecture, a network of resilience etched by time and weather. You’re not just asked to look at it, but to stand beneath its canopy and feel the voltage in your body.

A deep ultramarine sky amplifies the sense of scale and quiet power, holding the tree in a suspended moment between stillness and storm. The scene may be empty of human figures, but it’s dense with presence; solitude reads as magnitude, not absence. The title points to the split second when the world changes—when sound tears through silence and light splits the dark, when anticipation tips into revelation.

In conversation with traditional night landscapes, this painting trades soft moonlight for something sharper, more electric, more alive. The oak isn’t a passive symbol here; it’s a witness—rooted, unbroken, bracing for whatever comes next. What emerges when the world is stripped to its bones and lit from within? Step closer. Stand under it. Feel the air vibrate.