Fleeting Moment is the right panel of the triptych Moments of Eternity, created for the exhibition Bron van Inspiratie at De Paardenkamp in Soest.

This work is the most dramatic of the three panels. It portrays a horse turned inward, quiet and deeply contemplative. Of all the horses I drew for this triptych, she was the oldest, and that sense of age and inward stillness became central to the work.

The composition is built around a contrast between two emotional states. On one side, there is the calm, introspective presence of the older horse, absorbed in her own thoughts and memories. On the other, there is a luminous image of happiness held in memory: a girl riding at speed, carried forward through streams of light, movement and air.

In this work, I wanted to reflect on the bittersweet nature of joyful moments. Happiness can be intense and real, yet it cannot be repeated in exactly the same way. It remains with us in memory, but it can never be lived again. Even when new moments of happiness arrive, they belong to another time, another self, another feeling.

The older horse becomes a vessel for this reflection. Through her quiet, unhurried old age, the work turns back toward a distant moment of youth — a moment of movement, speed, wind and freedom. The remembered image does not return as literal reality, but as an inner vision: fragile, radiant and filled with emotional resonance.

In Fleeting Moment, memory is both consolation and loss. What has passed cannot be recovered, yet it continues to live within us, luminous and unchanged in feeling, even as time moves on.