DaNice D. Marshall never intended to become a painter. For most of her life, she was a writer, a woman who lived within language, shaping stories with rhythm, cadence and the intimacy of thought. Writing had always been her home, her compass, her way of mapping both the inner and outer worlds.
Then silence arrived. A severe vascular disease altered the course of her life completely, gradually eroding her hearing and, with it, her ability to concentrate long enough to write. The sentences that had once come effortlessly began to dissolve into silence, and for the first time, the woman who had always found her voice through words was left without one.
What could have marked an ending instead became a transformation. During recovery, Marshall reached for paint, not with any grand ambition, but to fill the silence. The colors became her new language, a visual form of storytelling that replaced words with gesture. At first, she painted abstracts, rhythmic movements that echoed the pulse of memory and emotion. Over time, her work evolved into luminous, deeply human narrative portraiture that carried the weight and tenderness of untold stories.
Painting became her way of writing again. Brushstrokes replaced punctuation; color became syntax. Each layer of paint served as a paragraph, each canvas a page. Her mind, still that of a writer, sought clarity and structure in this unfamiliar form. She began to mix metaphors in pigment instead of prose, constructing visual sentences that completed thoughts once confined to language.