There is a particular quality to the air in the minutes before a heavy West African rainstorm. The sky turns the colour of bruised terracotta. The ground goes dark and still, and everything holds its breath. Before the Rain captures that precise moment, rendered in colour and texture rather than image or illustration.

The lower half of the canvas is a brooding near-black deep umber, suggesting cracked dry earth through the scattered raw texture across its surface. Above it, the upper register fills with deep terracotta, dusty violet-brown, and smouldering dark gold, the colours of a sky dense with harmattan dust and incoming weather.

The boundary between them is soft and indistinct, a blurred zone of shadow and warmth where the two worlds meet, with a single thin thread of warm amber running along it: the last light before the storm takes over.

This piece carries the kind of tension that stops a visitor mid-step and makes a home office feel intentional.