The Struggle - Beginning in Shadow

The Beauty of Darkness Before the Light

Art history often reminds us that an artist’s journey is rarely a straight line. Many of the world’s most beloved painters began in shadow, working through grief, despair, or unease on canvas, before arriving at the luminous works that would make them famous.

Francisco Goya painted some of the most disturbing images ever committed to paint—haunting visions like Saturn Devouring His Son—yet he also created joyful tapestry cartoons alive with color and charm. Picasso’s Blue Period captured poverty and loneliness, but within just a few years his canvases erupted into playful pinks, bold cubist forms, and ultimately the radiant masterpieces that secured his legacy. Even Claude Monet’s early works carry a murky heaviness, far removed from the shimmering water lilies that would become synonymous with peace and beauty.

This pattern recurs across centuries. Artists often find their voice first in darkness, as if shadow provides the contrast needed for light to shine. The early, unsettling works—the ones that feel like bad dreams—are not mistakes or missteps. They are part of the necessary struggle, the stage-setting for transformation.

Collectors who are drawn to such works know something important: paintings born from shadow often hold the deepest emotional charge. They invite us into mystery, tension, and raw feeling. And in doing so, they connect us to the timeless human story of wrestling with struggle before discovering clarity.

A Contemporary Echo of That Journey

Standing before a canvas born from this tradition, one is reminded that struggle is not just history—it is ongoing. Artists today still confront the same timeless questions: how do we translate conflict, desire, and unease into form and color? How do we give shape to the intensity of human experience without softening its edges?

Some paintings do not offer easy comfort. Instead, they compel us to linger, to wrestle with ambiguity. They feel like fragments of myth, half-dream and half-nightmare, carrying us to places where beauty and unease are inseparable. These are works that refuse to be merely decorative; they insist on being felt.

Such paintings are rare, because they ask as much from the viewer as they do from the artist. They challenge us, unsettle us, and in the process, they hold our gaze longer than any serene landscape ever could.

Artists Who Transitioned from Dark to Bright
1. Francisco Goya (1746–1828)
Early/Mid Career: His Black Paintings and works like Saturn Devouring His Son are among the most disturbing, raw, and darkly psychological in European art.
Later Career: Before his decline into illness, Goya also produced luminous portraits and tapestry cartoons full of playful color and charm, which were very popular.
2. Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Early Career: His La Grenouillère and early landscapes have a heavier, murky palette and often reflect personal financial and emotional struggles.
Later Career: His Water Lilies series became synonymous with tranquility, light, and radiant color, making him a household name in Impressionism.
3. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
Early Career: The Blue Period (1901–1904) is full of melancholy, poverty, and grief, dominated by cool tones and somber subjects.
Later Career: The Rose Period and Cubist explorations brought warmth, playfulness, and a more experimental use of color, leading into the vibrant, bold canvases that cemented his fame.
4. Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
Early Career: His beginnings were rooted in Symbolism and darker, moodier landscapes.
Later Career: He evolved into one of the pioneers of abstraction, with works exploding into bright, geometric color compositions that defined modernism.
5. Marc Chagall (1887–1985)
Early Career: His works were sometimes shadowed by the hardship of his Jewish heritage in early 20th-century Russia.
Later Career: He embraced dreamlike, floating figures and radiant color, producing works that celebrated love and joy, widely adored by audiences.
6. Yayoi Kusama (1929– )
Early Career: Her works in the 1950s–60s were psychologically intense, often reflecting trauma, obsession, and darker surreal imagery.
Later Career: Her signature polka dots and infinity rooms, full of light and playful repetition, made her an international sensation, beloved even by casual art viewers.
7. Mark Rothko (1903–1970) (a counterexample, but useful to note)
Rothko’s career is interesting in reverse—his luminous, glowing color fields gave way to somber, black-dominated canvases at the end of his life.  As a paradoxical foil: not all artists moved toward light, some were consumed by shadow.

The Struggle

In The Struggle, the world above is absent; what remains is the underside, the hidden place where light fractures into shadow. Two figures surface from this obscurity—part human, part myth—locked in an embrace that could be passion, conflict, or both. It is an image that resists resolution, one that draws its power precisely from ambiguity.

Like the early works of so many great artists, The Struggle holds the gravity of a bad dream and the beauty of a half-remembered myth. It is not a painting that seeks to soothe. Instead, it lingers—demanding attention, demanding interpretation, demanding that the viewer stay with the tension it creates.