The Quiet Before

Acrylic painting - Elegance and detachment on the edge of crises.

Blog Post by Rebecca Halford

There’s a strange tension in moments of stillness—especially the ones that come just before everything changes.

When I painted The Quiet Before, I was thinking about the comfort of beautiful surroundings, the seduction of stillness, and the way it can lull us into inaction. The figure is calm, elegant, and entirely at ease. Her body curls into the chair, drink in hand, expression unreadable. She’s not alarmed—but should she be?

This painting reflects what I’ve been feeling about the current political mood in the United States. There’s a creeping normalization of extremism, a quiet drift toward authoritarianism that too often goes unnoticed or unchallenged. We scroll, we watch, we comment—but do we act?

The Quiet Before isn't loud. It doesn’t shout about injustice or demand attention. Instead, it sits in silence and asks a quieter question: What happens when we choose not to notice? What do we risk when comfort takes the place of urgency?

This isn’t a painting of chaos or violence—it’s a portrait of the pause. And maybe the pause is the most dangerous place of all.

Is silence a form of complicity?