Oil and acrylic on birch wood cradled panel, 43x28x2cm.
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This  painting presents a familiar spiritual image reimagined for the present moment. A pigeon — often overlooked, dismissed, or ignored — is elevated into the role traditionally occupied by the dove of the Holy Spirit. Suspended in a shaft of light within an arched, icon-like form, the bird appears both sacred and fragile, caught between heaven and earth.
Held gently in its beak is a red-striped plastic straw, positioned like an olive branch. The gesture is quiet, almost tender, transforming a symbol of peace into something unsettlingly contemporary. The straw becomes a marker of our time — a fragment of human presence carried into a space once reserved for purity and transcendence.
The atmosphere surrounding the pigeon is luminous yet unsettled. Clouds churn and dissolve, and faint vertical drips move through the composition, suggesting time, erosion, and the slow consequences of our actions. Light still falls from above, but it does not dominate; instead, it feels distant, as though something once certain now hesitates.
Despite this tension, the work is not without beauty or compassion. The pigeon’s iridescent plumage reveals unexpected colour and delicacy, inviting the viewer to reconsider what is worthy of reverence. The painting asks us to look again — at the animals we live alongside, at the symbols we inherit, and at what we choose to carry forward.
Rather than offering answers, the work holds a moment of pause. It reflects a world where the sacred has not disappeared, but has been altered — where hope persists, though it arrives burdened with the traces of modern life.