My first real kiss happened right against the front window of a restaurant. Everyone inside eating could see us. I was too young to know what I was doing, and it came so suddenly my mind didn’t even have time to catch up. I’d imagined kisses from movies. Effortless. This was the opposite: nervous, clumsy, teeth and noses colliding. We kept breaking apart because we couldn’t stop laughing, the sound muffled against each other’s mouths. Between the laughs, we played this quiet, ridiculous game. Mid-sentence one of us would lean in and steal the last word with a kiss. It felt silly in the best way, like we’d stumbled onto something private and entirely our own. Nothing was graceful about it, but that unguarded mess made it feel real. Afterward, I replayed the whole thing endlessly in my mind. A small secret we’d just uncovered together.
Even now, years later, a kiss still feels stolen in the gentlest way. Unexpected, like a quiet gift. It might come mid-sentence, turning ordinary talk into something intimate. When lips meet and everything narrows to warmth and breath, nothing else is there. Each time brings that familiar soft tingle, a spark of childlike joy that lights up inside, no matter how old I get.
That’s the feeling I wanted to hold onto in “Stolen Kiss” The title comes from the same quiet disbelief I still get. A moment so vivid it feels slightly unreal. To do it, I mixed abstract digital painting with photorealistic elements. Dreamlike brushstrokes dissolve into lifelike people, the way a kiss can feel both physical and a little unreal. Two bodies, but the feeling drifts somewhere closer to a dream. In the middle of smoke and rushing trains and wanted posters peeling from the walls, these two figures take a quiet moment together, simple and unguarded. Worth every clumsy risk.
