Sometimes the imagination begins its work long before the conscious mind understands what it is creating
That has always been my experience with the image first then meaning.
Before I knew the story, I began writing Dawn of Dragon Secrets, I painted a painting is called Deep Space with Yellow Space Station in 2023. Inspired by the journey of the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) launched on the 25 December 2021.
At the time, I was not consciously imagining Michael Hoshino, the NSA, the Xet-Ari, the distant planet of Azyra, or the ancient dragons whose song would eventually begin to sound through my story
I only knew that I wanted to paint the silence and immensity of deep space, where humans dare to leave their mark.
Against a field of deep indigo, I placed a luminous yellow structure—something human-made, geometric and ordered, suspended within the mystery of the universe. Around it floated pale shapes suggestive of light, energy, portals or fragments of some greater mathematical design.
The painting held two opposing sensations for me: the human desire to bring order to the unknown, and the overwhelming mystery that remains beyond everything we think we understand.
Two years later, early December 2025 I began writing.
What started as one story gradually opened into something much larger: a trilogy now called The One Dragon Song. Its first book, Dawn of Dragon Secrets, unfolds across science, mythology and human love. It asks what might happen when humanity’s technological brilliance carries us further than our emotional and spiritual maturity can safely take us.
As I wrote, familiar elements began appearing.
Deep space.
Golden light.
Geometric structures.
Scientific ambition.
The silence surrounding the unknown.
The tension between what humanity can discover and what humanity is ready to hold sacred.
Looking back at this painting now, I realise the story I have to tell had already begun.
All along it was waiting beneath conscious thought, finding its first expression through colour, shape and inspirational meaning. Perhaps the yellow space station was an early glimpse of the scientific world I would later create. Perhaps the darkness around it was not empty space at all, but Mystery- the unseen presence moving quietly through the trilogy.
As an artist, I have learned that my creative imagination, does not always happen in a straight line.
A painting’s meaning only comes to me when I look back. At the time all I know is that an idea nags me until I put oil, brush and canvas together creating a dialogue.
I write only write poetry when I am experiencing my deepest emotional moments, the words pour out of me.
I first thought that I began this trilogy when I sat down to write the first chapter of Book 1, Dawn of Dragon Secrets.
Now I know that is not true.
The story has been forming for years through my personal philosophy, paintings, poetry, dreams, experiences and lifelong connection with the ocean. Each work may have carried a fragment of it before I could see the whole.
Deep Space with Yellow Space Station feels like one of those fragments.
I did not yet know the story or the characters who would enter the pages and my life. And I certainly did not know that dragons were already waiting.
I believe my imaginal world always knows the story before I do.
You can read my Substack posts: Link: https://substack.com/profile/157179985-dianne-lofts-taylor/note/c-356523532
— Dianne Lofts-Taylor