Lilies Scratched Into Silence

Lilies Scratched Into Silence gives its first light to the flowers. A crown of white lilies, formed as a field of fine scratches, holds the brightest passage in the whole piece, while the face beneath waits in a hush of its own making.

The eyes are closed, and that single choice carries the mood of the entire portrait. Nothing here asks to be seen, only to be witnessed. The light follows the turn inward, resting along the brow, the bridge of the nose and the curve of the mouth, before letting everything else sink back into black.

Around that quiet centre the lilies do their full work. Each petal is held by a field of individual marks, dense at the crown where the light gathers, loosening toward the edges where a leaf or a single stray bloom drifts back toward the dark. Worn this close to the skin, flowers read less as ornament than as offering, the one part of her that answers the light without hesitation.

Below the crown, the shoulders are barely there, a faint trace of surface held low in the frame, present only so the face has somewhere to rise from. The room, the garment, any specific likeness, all of it is allowed to disappear into black, so that what remains feels like presence itself rather than one particular woman.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is formed by controlled scratches worked into the surface of acrylic glass, a field of fine scratches that gathers into petals and brow and stays unbroken dark everywhere the light does not reach. The image is always present, in daylight as under a single directed beam. Light does not create it, it sharpens it, and the contrast deepens until the crown seems to lift off the surface.

Lilies Scratched Into Silence belongs to In the Light, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of letting a person step forward out of the dark entirely on their own terms.

"Even with her eyes closed, she decides what the light may keep."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

Questions about this work, availability or shipping can be sent through the contact page.