The Story of Inner Compass — The Painting I Made When I Had No Map
- daryasokolova
- Jun 5
- 3 min read
There is a particular kind of courage that nobody warns you about.
Not the dramatic kind. Not the courage of a moment but of a decision made in a flash, a leap taken before you have time to think. The other kind. The quiet, daily, grinding courage of having already leapt, and now simply having to keep going in a direction you cannot yet see.
I know that courage well. I painted it.
Inner Compass was made inspired by my first months in Dubai.
I had left Kazakhstan. Left everything familiar - family, friends, the landscape I had grown up inside, the language that surrounded me without effort. I arrived in a city that was glossy and fast and entirely indifferent to the fact that I had just dismantled my entire life to be there. Dubai does not pause for your transition. It simply continues, at full speed, and you either find your footing or you don’t.
I was trying to find my footing.
There were days when the studio felt like the only honest place. The paintings didn’t need me to have it together. They didn’t need me to seem certain or capable or settled. They just needed me to show up and put paint on canvas, which I could do even on the days when very little else felt possible.
Inner Compass came from those days.
She is sixty by sixty centimetres. Small for me. I usually work large, monumental, paintings that demand to be seen from across a room. But she needed to be intimate. She needed to be the size of something held close rather than announced.
Her eyes are closed.
I made that choice deliberately, and I understood it completely only after I had made it. Closing her eyes was not passivity, it was the opposite. It was the act of turning inward when the outward world offers nothing useful. When the maps around her, and they are there, surrounding her, present in the composition, when those maps cannot tell you where you are going, the only navigational tool left is the one inside.
The palette is muted. Beiges, warm stones, skin tones that blur into each other until flesh becomes surface becomes ground. There is no drama in the colour. The drama is in the stillness. In the closed eyes. In the particular expression that is not peace exactly - it is something harder earned than peace. It is the face of someone who has decided, in the absence of certainty, to trust herself anyway.
I have been asked many times what I was thinking when I painted her.
The honest answer is that I was not thinking. I was feeling my way through something I did not yet have words for. That is often what painting is. Not the illustration of an idea you already have, but the discovery of something you did not know you knew until the brush found it.
What I found, in those first Dubai months, painting in a studio in a city that was not yet home, was this:
The strongest compass is not the one pointing north. It is the one inside that says you will be okay when nothing else makes sense. When you have no network, no proof, no guarantee. When the bravest thing you can do is simply stay in the room, the studio, the country, the life you chose and keep making work.
Inner Compass is that conviction made visible.
She is sixty by sixty centimeters , acrylic on canvas, and she is part of the Power & Presence series - six paintings made for women who have built something from nothing and know what it costs.
She is available now.
If you have ever closed your eyes to the world in order to finally hear yourself, she was painted for you.
View Inner Compass and the full Power & Presence collection here.
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