Falling to Earth: Becoming Human

We fall, not down – but into being.

That’s where this series began – with the feeling of arrival. The quiet shock of suddenly existing somewhere new.

Falling to Earth grew from my fascination with aliens who look human. I kept thinking about that first moment they open their eyes on Earth – like a newborn trying to make sense of the light. They land, they look around, they try to fit in, but something always gives them away. There’s a fragility in that, even when they hold immense power.

I wanted to paint that tension – the divine disguised as ordinary. To explore what it means to carry something vast inside a body that breaks, bleeds, and feels.

The series follows two cinematic beings who embody that contradiction:

Leeloo, from The Fifth Element, and Thomas Jerome Newton, from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Both arrive with purpose and purity – only to be undone by emotion, by tenderness, by the strange limits of flesh.

Each work is painted in acrylic and 23K gold leaf on wooden panels. The compositions move between cinema and icon – film frames suspended in gold. Time folds. Scenes overlap. The gold catches like a signal, a fragment of memory breaking through the surface.

While working on this series, I wanted to capture a few cinematic frames within a single painting, to let several moments coexist. I chose a vertical format to echo the rhythm of 35mm film strips, stacking fragments of time inside one image. It was an interesting challenge, finding balance between narrative flow and stillness, between motion and icon.

Leeloo glows in the language of rebirth, she is radiant, learning love.

Newton flickers between presence and distance, a being unraveling into feeling.

Together, they trace what it means to fall, to land, to feel, to belong.

Because sometimes, falling isn’t a descent.

It’s the moment you finally arrive.

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Acrylic paint & 23K gold leaf on board, 24x36 in each, framed in black wooden float frames.