Sarah – the stolen painting

Oil on tracing paper, 140 × 110 cm
Atelier des loges – Beaux-Arts de Paris,
24 May 2024

Painted in a rare pause between my father’s dawn awakenings, Sarah carries within it both tenderness and truth. Forty minutes of uninterrupted breath, where love, loss, and light converged.

The original was stolen from Beaux-Arts de Paris. A work valued at €26,300, filed in police report PV 01903/2025/010331. But the value cannot be measured in numbers alone. It was radiant, alive with the tenderness that had carried me through nights by my father’s side.

Some paintings never truly belong to us. They slip into the world, demanded by forces larger than ownership. The theft of Sarah revealed what I already knew: art is not possession. It is presence. It insists on being seen, felt, remembered.

What could have been a wound became a threshold. This loss propelled me into clarity — to step into the portal life had prepared me for, to embody the artist I always was. Sarah did not vanish; she expanded, becoming a manifesto of resilience, a reminder that art transcends theft. Her essence remains, luminous as dawn, untouchable.