How come?

In colour. Blue. 40x40cm (WIP, I think)
Soft pastel/acrylics on canvas

... that my abstracts are always ending up seascapes?

Don't have a clue!

This is in fact an abstract interior still life, in case anyone is asking.

And just to add to confusion: it's pastel on a 3D canvas, over pumice, gesso and acrylics. Oh, and its first incarnation, this hosted a rubbish landscape in oil from a few years ago.

I let it mature a bit and see if I can sort out the composition a bit more.

In colour: squares

Having arrived back home on Monday night, I quickly realised:

I could do a paired series to the White Room.

Simply not of someone else's flat somewhere but of mine now. No: it's not that I 'could' do this. There's little choice, I feel. I simply have to. The start:

In colour: square 1, 10x10cm, Soft pastel on board


In colour: square 2, 10x10cm, Soft pastel on board


In colour: square 3, 10x10cm, Soft pastel on board

Matisse, colour, and I

I'm putting myself up for the modesty award today, with a title like that. But never mind...

Following my White Room experimentation I've been reading more about, and preferably BY Matisse. It's Matisse On Art. And it's a funny little book. Funny because each original piece of writing is preceeded by an, often longer than the original, introduction by Jack Flam. It's all very well but goes some way in confirming my view on why I do not want to become an art historian/critic. [hahaha.... slagging while blogging is so much more fun ;)]

So, after reading the first few of the introductions I've decided to skip them altogether and it makes for much better reading.

There are three themes that intrigue me in Matisse:

1. The way he produces space that is so full of ambivalence, superficial and completely out of reach;
2. The way he uses colour to achieve this;
3. And all the while the space he creates on canvas is so ambivalent, he thrives for an expression of his own sensations and emotions - by the means of painting - that ranks harmony and serenity above all other sensations.

Oops, (3) just acquired words while I was typing. His desire for balance and harmony struck me first off when reading On Art, but all the same the space he creates is so ambiguous, so obvious yet ungraspable. Interesting... is there more in it than harmony?

Similarly to Morandi, Matisse's use of flattening of 3D space catches my attention - the trickery, the playful involvement of the onlooker in letting us partake in a game of hide and seek, of appearances, illusions, a bit of shadowdancing and a good performance. In the form of an apparently immobile and fixed STILL LIFE. Ha! Still life, my a***! It is certainly not still.

Well... I was planning to cover (2), his use of colour, in this post today, but seeing my ongoing rambling in tangents - while always worthwhile - it seems an ambitious plan.

So, maybe I should start with the "I" from the title. I was introduced to Matisse with one of the very first of my pastel sketches/drawings/paintings that I posted on WetCanvas for some c&c, four years ago. I don't remember why I posted a second version of this view from my previous flat. In my mind, this, the first one, is still the better one (even if only on greyboard rather than any proper ground), and if I remember correctly it's still at home behind M.'s wardrobe.

View through Hallway, 2005
soft pastel on board, 48x65cm

For some curiosity, see the link to the discussion on WC here.

Matisse was recommended for his inversion of blue and green for distance, red and yellow for proximity. And that I should make up my mind between a more 3d or 2d feel of the image.

In Notes of a Painter (1908), Matisse made his first and explicit intervention into how he paints and what he regards as important. And there's a lot in there on order, clarity and what he calls a 'condensation of sensations' which achieves serenity in a painting and supercedes the capturing of fleeting moments and impressions.

I'm circling round that sentiment... circle, circle, circle... and I think that that is very different to how I use colour. And how I enjoy using pastels for plein air work. I think that whenever someone asks why I love pastels I will reply (probably along many other pastelists):

I love them for their immediacy... pure pigment in stick form and on it goes and it's there.

No condensation of sensation for me... rather a bit of a shameless: I feel. I paint. It's there. (Or not).

Circling further, I also see how Matisse is thus radically different from people like Eardley or de Stael. The ability of Eardley's paintings to move me to tears stands out, and it stands out as very different to Matisse's pursuit of serenity and harmony.

Isn't that all very intriguing!? I will continue.

But first, another pastel sketch I found from California. Initially I thought it was from the day when sky and sea become one, but it is in fact from the morning after the fog was beginning to lift, Ate had already gone swimming and I needed to get a bit of the silence of the fog on paper - though I admit, it looks a bit too thunderstormy humid instead of silent.

Kalifornien Strand, soft pastel on board, 35x25cm

Nonetheless, I am with Matisse when he declares he employs colour to capture sensations and emotions... they are not there to copy nature but to be expressive of his subjective being there. And for that, I am also rather forgiving of the rather rubbish composition of some of the plein air sketches of late... this one's particularly bad and wonky... but it was the sensation of colour that I was after. That's all.

Sunny Sunday

... follows from Silent Saturday that was also Blistery, Rainy and Thundery Saturday aka Have a Scotland Day in Berlin.

When we sat underneath the sun cover that was temporarily (and not very well) providing rain shelter, J laughed: 'You brought your weather with you, haven't you.' - How right he was. Hehehe... and I also brought the glorious sunlight that comes with, or rather after, a rainshower. He noticed that too.

So, one of the tasks for while here is to draw and paint the rain and thunder... This is something I haven't succeeded in so far.

But: a few days ago my windows to the West promised a fantastic evening sky.

Thursday evening, westwards, 9pm
Pastel in A4 Moleskine

And guess what: they far exceeded on their promise, with this 15 minutes later.

Thursday evening, westwards, 9.15pm
Pastel in A4 Moleskine

The swan and I

The Swan.

... could be the start of a fantastic short story. But it isnae (at least for today).


It's much more prosaic. Encountered when trying to sketch the grassy, watery, boggy inbetween land that is the bay of Lochranza on the Northern tip of Arran. This was at high tide and the swan was toddling about, munching a bit of grass here, flapping its wings there. Well... until it discovered me and my pastels.

After a standoff (yes, I know... I wouldn't have won) I got saved by a hoard of sheep moving in fast and - probably joyfully oblivious to the mighty swan - made it retreat back to the river bank.

Phew...


Did I say it was about to rain? This is what I did anyway:

Lochranza Bay, 3
Graphite and neo ii in A4 Moleskine


Lochranza Bay, 4
Soft Pastel in A4 Moleskine


Lochranza Bay, 5
Soft Pastel in A4 Moleskine

Going back to Elquí Valle

... I wish I was... but this has to suffice.

Pisco Elquí 1,
Pastel on Board, 35x25cm

My fellow Watermarkers have been putting up a fantastic set of posts around Water on Earth Day on our blog as well as their own blogs. So, I thought I'd join (and have excuse to bunk off early from my tedious lecture and presentation writing tasks that will bug me for the next week).

I mentioned how much I loved the day in Elquí Valle and the night spent stargazing at Mamalluca. Some of the reasons for that I hadn´t mentioned yet though. Let me make up for that.

Apart from the great clarity of the air and sky and the high contrast between hilltops and lime green valley floor it was the fact that Carlos, our guide for the day, didn`t really speak any English (well, I think he would maintain that he does, but he really didn´t) - so the day was spent in Spanish.

Secondly, the fact that one of our first stops was the tomb of Gabriela Mistral, ¿recuerdala? The great Chilean poet of earthy mysticism, romanticism and essentialism. She was born far up in the valley, in Montegrande at the end of c19 and was buried there.

So, as it is befitting for a poet, Carlos's first Spanish lesson for R and myself was ´Las tres grandes penas de Gabriela Mistral´- the three great sufferings of Gabriela Mistral: her father abandoned her family when she was three; a man who was madly in love with her committed suicide when she was 20; and her adoptive son (her brother's child, abondoned by his father at the age of six) also committed suicide when he was 18.

I hate the thought that all that much tragedy is necessary to be a good artist. But maybe it's not necessary, right?

In any case, almost two weeks later I bought a tattered copy of Mistral's Poema de Chile at a market stall in Santiago. I think many of the poems were written in the 1930s, she presented some of them at a conference on the human geography of Chile in the US in 1938. It's a patriotic and romantic attempt at nation building in poetry. It reads like an old-fashioned regional geography: covering not only different regions of the vast country but also the light, the stars, the mines, alcohol, trees, and the ocean. R and I are planning a good bit of text analysis of this - she for her lectures in environmental management, I for the problems I have with romantic landscapism. But more on that later.

I leave you with another verse found on the main square in Pisco Elquí - the village was called La Unión until 1936 when the Chilean government, in attempt to authenticate Pisco as of Chilean origin and not Peruvian - changed its name in a grand piece of economic policy. Imagine, Oban was to be changed to Whiskey Oban. How bizarre... but: here's Mistral on the sensuous qualities of Elquí Valle (suitably written on a pisco barrel).

'Since my touch has left behind these sweet and splendid pastures,
all that I am left with is the dry scent of those vines and fig trees ...'

Postcard 8: and now into autumn

... as you may have noticed, it is Saturday evening and I have access to a computer again. Postcards are written, pictures are uploaded and we are sampling yet another very good Chilean red wine while the rest of Temuco is having a rather quiet fería for the Semana Santa.

After a brief stop in Santiago on Thursday night with two very nice people we met in the tiny boat on the Pacific while watching dolphins we drove some 1000 kms further south and suddenly we´re from desert heat in northern Germany or even South Sweden - plus some rather exotic plants, a few vulcanoes and the rather uninspiring Chilean cuisine which stays with us. R has been faithful to at least one empanada a day, I´ve abstaind from seafood for two days now (replaced with beef and plenty of avocado and tomato plus the current highlight: Merken, a very smokey very hot chili sauce which goes with everything and turns the blandest bread into something exciting... and, wow, can bread be bland).

So, I´ve made a couple of actual postcards on the bus journey south. They look surprisingly like the fields around my parent´s house, so I thought, some of my German friends may get them.

Sorry ;) (not really!)

South of Chillán,
Pastel on handmade paper,
15x10cm each

Postcard 6: Boats can be very small...

... and they may even disappear right in the middle of the Pacific. Like this one here. From one small boat to the other. And alongside us there were some dolphins, penguins, sea lions, cormorans, pelicans, eagles, picadors and assorted other wildlife (I think R thought she was in heaven, I was kind of more taken by the tiny boat in the middle of the ocean scenario... being the complete sucker that I am for big things likes stars, oceans, deserts and all that).

We drove to Punta Choros. Well: pretty much in the middle of nowhere, a small harbour at the end of a dirt track through the desert, somewhere of the Panamericana. Very cool! And excessively good fun, thanks to all of the above.

Punta Choros a Isla Choros,
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

Postcard 5: ¿El valle lo mas lindo de Chile?

¡Elquí Valle! ¡Claro!

... I think I´ll be slotting the days in as they happened, seeing that it is now Saturday and we are already 1000 kms further south.

So: Monday 6 April, we went to the Elquí Valley. Rura, rural, RURAL. Narrow, narrow, NARROW. The most fascinating contrast between densely cultivated vineyards and orchards on the valley´s bottom and the Cordilleras rising steep and bleak up to the sky.

Something like this:

Tres Cruces, Elquí Valle,
Pastel on board, 35x25cm


Pisco Elquí, Elquí Valle,
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

Landscape marks

Where the wild things live, Detail
Soft pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

I have been going back to my copy of Wolf Kahn's Pastels rather frequently, soaking up some of the markmaking and palette choices of his.

I was intrigued to read more about his approach to landscape as a subject - it resonated on a number of levels, some of which I mentioned before briefly.

1. Landscapes as creating space (I am tempted to talk about the production of space, but then I'm firmly in academic jargon, so I leave that for a moment).

Barbara Novak, in her Introduction (p. 7) talks about it as:

Kahn's art represents the most difficult of closely negotiated mergers between the dialectics of abstract form/color nurtured by [Hans] Hofmann's tutelage and his own pragmatic observation of nature in the 'raw', if not the wild...

Kahn's work is very subtly positioned, perhaps through part of what he calls 'strategies', midway between the demands of nature and those of art.

Bend in the River by Wolf Kahn, 1984
Soft Pastel, 22x30 inches, location unknown

She lists a wide range of key influences including

• George Innes
• Albert Pintham Ryder
• Edward Hopper
• Mark Rothko
• Martin Johnson Heade
• Winslow Homer
• Paul Gauguin, and
• Vincent Van Gogh,

and continues that

The nature of this space is disturbing in its imbalances, impressive in its effects and probably the result not only of artistic intention, but of a subtle push-pull between natural and pictorial spaces that must be mediated. (ibid)

This creating and making of space on a two-dimensional surface is infused by a

2. Sensitivity to mood, climate, light and place - I called that romantic love of nature landscapism before.

- so, the German romantics figure prominently, notably Friedrich Schelling's philosophy and
Caspar David Friedrich's paintings - fertilized, as Novak (p. 11) calls it by Hans Hoffmann's teachings and Kahn's own admiration of modern masters such as Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko and Pierre Bonnard. These names suggest

... clues to what [Kahn] is after in his own work: stillness, what he calls 'radiance', and a coloristic experience that, as he says 'ups the ante'. Place becomes meaningful for him when returns to it again and again, to 'deepen the experience'.

Here, soft pastel provides a medium with which to record immediate experience and ability to rely on process - to be worked up later in a more formal process with oil paints. The medium enables Kahn to grapple at once with the subject of nature and its pictorial solution.

• See my previous posts discussing Wolf Kahn, here
• One of my previous posts on concerns over landscape, here

Oh, and then I had an image of myself staring back at me in a weird place on the sidebar, having momentarily forgotten that I had sent it to Casey at Pastel for a guest spot. So, Casey will host a post about my fields, ponds and various reflections shortly, but has announced it yesterday. I am very excited about this - Casey's own work as well as his discussion of Kahn and other Colorists has been hughely important for me to get a sense of the possibilities of pastels.

Lines across a field

Lines across a field, 37x45cm
Pastel on Japanese paper

... ok, here's the promised crit & comment bit on Saturday's studies of THE field. This should have been ready earlier in the evening but some simple editing tasks currently take ages. I even had a Photoshop Elements in my shopping trolley inbetween.

I am intending to be good-willed and patient with my new open source image editing software.

But: essentially: I don't understand it! It makes out to be intuitive and yet it asks for channels, terminals, plug-ins, for me to build its help file and suddenly I am back in year 11 trying to ignore the fact that not a single one of my scripts ever got the computer to play chess, move the cursor or whatever tasks one tried to make a computer in 1990 perform. Ach... but... I still don't understand it. The Help files aren't built and the user manual doesn't tell me how I can change colour retrospectively. So, Gesa, start again...

After a while of this, I now have something that highlights the problems in the study. It was study no 2, it followed the one I posted on Sunday. Again: the task was drawing marks and a different palette. The scene originates with last summer's sketches and I did some more in December. I am therefore back with the fields again; searching for a subject for a reductive lino print.



But before that, I tackled some highly unsuitable paper with my Terrage sticks - it's a Japanese paper, fairly thin and with a kind of felted surface - consequently: crisp marks kept evading me and it dissolved rather quickly - as the second circle from the bottom shows.

The composition looked wrong to me, but after a while I realise that it's a bit more subtle than that: the top circle shows too much contrast between sky and forest in the background; and the salmon in the second from top circle folds the space of the field against the forest in a funny way.

In many ways I love that effect: how hues make space, bend it, twist it and confuse the onlooker. I like the salmon colour a lot since I discovered it, but it doesn't work in that field.

So, for a pastel drawing study, the marks are intriguing but some of the hues are not worked out in relation to each other - I think the violet blue in the foreground is wrong too.

And, while I cannot as of yet put my finger on it, I think it got me further for a reduction linocut. There's something in the layering of different hues here - and perhaps the solidity the drawing is struggling with in the background, which could work well in print.

Good... more on that to follow.

All new beginnings

... are also so exciting.

So, if we stick with my new sketching location, take a look at its possibilities: an undulating river, moored boats in various states of decay, sandy shores, grassy shores, trees with exposed roots, little waves, bigger waves, hills in the distance, mist in the distance, ducks, swans, the air filled with the sound of gulls and the faint smell of the sea.

And, to keep my tree intrigue in motion: look at the birch trees against a winter sky.

I need to go again, rather urgently, I feel. The last two times I was there with other people - the first visit worked well with time for sketching - and me asking for that time; the second one was a bit more difficult: too much movement, someone I didn't know well enough, and some confusions over the purpose of a weekend (mine: doing art and having fun; his: working).

That clearly tells me: Gesa, go on your own next time :) But for tomorrow, the forecast is full of hail, snow and rain... and: the fog I had already once before:

Loch Lomond in fog,
pastel on board, 35x25

'Where the wild things live'

- that was Juanita's comment on this drawing. You have seen a small detail of it already and today is the day for all of it*, and some more details.

Where the wild things live, Detail
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

'Where the wild things live' - I was well chuffed with that title. She got the eeriness and moodiness straight away. I made it a couple of weeks ago when I took more of the handmade Arches paper to draw with pastels. The palette is again similar to the earlier one, but less limited. The marks are drawing marks with some later reworking to calm some areas and to introduce more highlights. It is less sketchy than the previous one, and - at least for me - a fair amount of time working and reworking was spent on it.

I was meaning to write-up more on Wolf Kahn's approach to landscape as subject matter along with this post. But: I left my notes on that in a notebook in Glasgow, while I am - again - in Berlin for a week. So: the WK's landscapisms have to wait a little long.

Do go and visit the wild things in the meantime, though:

Where the wild things live,
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

* oh, dear, there's a bit of stage fright going on right now:
what if the detail was so much better than the whole piece???

Happy hour - not just in Falkirk

Have this for a travel interlude along with some appropriate music.

Winter sun at Falkirk
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

Drawing with pastel and not painting

Trees in lake, study, 29x21cm
Coloured pencils on cartridge paper

The way I tend to use pastels is very much like paint: I tend to treat the support as a surface made up of different shapes, colour fields rather than developing a piece of art out of lines and linear marks. I also tend to work with pastel board - usually Colorfix board in darkish purple, light blue or anything in between. When I tag my pastel pieces in Flickr or Etsy, I have to remind myself to also label them as 'drawing' not simply as 'painting'.

So, although I work in dry medium I tend to say that I paint with pastels.

Just recently, I begun to draw with them. Not only that but I also reverted back to white paper as support - something I had given up as early as I could leave some sort of semi-competent mark with pastels quite a few years back. Admittedly, the paper I am using now is no longer cartridge but handmade, heavy-weight Arches paper.

And: how wonderful the white paper is and what drawing marks the pastels can make!

You may guess that the inspiration for this has been Wolf Kahn's use of pastels as his plein air medium of choice and my delving deeper into his palette, working process and subject matter.

So, while some smaller studies in pastel and coloured pencils preceeded these (like the one on the top of this page), here are two studies of the Pond Reflections. Both use a fairly limited palette, with greens introduced to the second one.

Pond reflections in Colour , no. 1
Soft pastel on Arches, 58x39 cm



Pond reflections in Colour , no. 2
Soft pastel on Arches, 58x39 cm

It's with these ventures outside comfort zones that I surprise myself: oh, are these really your marks? Your choice of hues? Of building up tension between different marks, hues and shapes?

Hm, maybe ownership isn't the way to approach this... let me think about this a little more.

I've been trying to draw with pastels for a while now and it's slowly building up a repertoire of marks and lines that will stay. It is also interesting to see the different hues that are being introduced - my small travel box now includes very different sticks to last summer - they are much more pigment-laden and full of reds, orange and magentas. Interesting...

No boat today

... well: none on Saturday is more correct.

Excited about the prospect of some pleasure boating on Loch Lomond in proper Scottish fog, we found the pier closed. So it was a little walk around the proper park instead. And, as luck may have it: I may have found a spot for regular visits.

It's an old and familiar one, indeed. But I hadn't been for a while. I don't think it'll be frequent, frequent but maybe once a month? That may get me somewhere to chime in with my fellow Watermarkers regular sketching/painting spots. So: for the March installment possibly with less fog, more green? Though I rather liked this weather - but I don't think I convinced the other two.

But, have this for the time being:

No boat today, 29x20cm
Soft Pastel on Arches paper

A bit of learning: Wolf Kahn

Over the past two weeks I've been digging around some work on how to work with water reflections. Most of the digging was done on my sofa with some of the books that had been staring at me for far too long.

Inspired by Lindsay's and Vivien's excellent posts on Kurt Jackson on Watermarks and their respective blogs, I begun with KJ's Thames Project. I still haven't seen any of his paintings in live, but this book already provided a few inspired coffee rounds with M..

But I got stuck: I find his markmaking just utterly fascinating, but it's a wet media markmaking... there is no way I can splash with dry dusty pastels.


So, enter artist #2: Wolf Kahn. I had bought one of his books when Casey's Wolf Kahn project introduced me to his fantastic colourist landscapes which build up so much tension and ambiguity between abstraction and representation that I can look at them forever.

Warm Tones on the River by Wolf Kahn, 1990
Pastel, 11x14 inches
Private Collection, New Mexico

Well, having decided to explore water reflections in dry media (well: mainly pastel) for a little while longer, I've been since reading through WK, had a few email conversations with Casey and begun to find a way of exploring WK's work.

As a start today: his palette. It got me terribly excited. I loved it. And nonetheless it has been a very strange and alien one for me. Hm, I don't quite know if I get the words for it.... let me muddle around for a while on this:

It's colorist - note the omission of the -u-. It's a palette I've come across since in quite a few other Northamerican artists, notably in Tracy Helgeson's oil paintings [I am putting the link to her Sales blog in here as much of her current work involves portraits.]
I am tempted to describe it as a rather cool palette, but that is not right: there's plenty of warm tones sitting next to high chroma cooler hues; so: high chroma is maybe more fitting; it seems rich in phtalos, cobalts and cadmiums. And, other than cobalt blue, these are pigments I haven't used much myself.

Well... I think I can see the difference and particularities but it will probably need a few more iterations to speak of them.

Kahn describes his pastels as immediate responses to - or better still: part of the experiental seeing of - being in landscape (or nature?). They are characterised by marks closely associated with drawing. Rather than using sanded boards, he draws on paper - lightly toned paper.

Diane Townsend's Terrage pastels are said be to be developed with a particulay eye on WK's palette. She carries one set of twelve of WK's favourites, which are these here:


Diane Townsend Terrage Pastels: Wolf Kahn's Favourites

dioxazine purple 188
mars violet 93
red oxide 88
quinacridone magenta 182
blue-violet gray 135
gray 124
ultramarine blue 18
ultramarine blue 20
permanent green 164
cadmium red light 56
cadmium yellow 67
cadmium orange 63

I found this image in the book, it's rather different to many of the others, but it resembled most closely some of the eeriness of my recent pond reflections.

Black Pond i (study) by Wolf Kahn, 1997
Pastel 11x14 inches
Beadleston Gallery, New York

And where is all this getting me to?

A first glimpse is this:

A pastel drawing on white paper with an unfamiliar palette. Hm... Comments to follow once I've made up my mind...

Trees in lake,
Soft pastel on paper, 30x20cm

A few related links:

• See Diane Townsend Pastel website here
• Casey's Wolf Kahn Project at the Colorist here
• Wolf Kahn Pastels by Wolf Kahn. Harry Abrams Publishers, New York, here
  

Some plein airs, daytime

The meadows #1
Pastel on board, 35x25cm


The meadows #2
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

... the abstraction to be filled (?)

Ok... more to follow from the previous one: That is difficult - not to read Rothko's Black on Grey paintings as horizon line. But I'm trying - and the painting is all the better for it. Brian had commented on abstraction as the barest hint at something, to be filled in. Let me fill that thought a bit further - or take it elsewhere.

Ambiguity.

I played a little game last Saturday. Took Tom to the corridor where my small studies were lined up and asked him what he thought. What he thought about the colours? He walks up and down, forward and backward. Then goes: 'I really like that field of bluebells. How wonderful.'

I grinned. It's water, all water, nothing but water. No bluebells. But suddenly there was a depression, a field of bluebells and a bit of woodlands in the distance on the left hand.

Seascape Study #2 or some bluebells?
Pastel on board, 18x12cm

Irene joins us. Listens to my complications on what I am trying to do, listens to Tom's representations of what he sees. And talks about colour fields.

Now, I've never seen any of her paintings. She doesn't show them. In the four years I've been to her classes I haven't seen her do a single piece of art. And somehow I really value that. It's hers, it's private. It's not for showing. I don't think that Tom or Chris who've been there a lot longer than me have ever seen any of her paintings. I know she paints abstract, large canvasses, with palette knives, several paintings at once, and some bits more. But that's it. That's all I need to know.

But back to the abstraction.

One of my pieces last year was based on the textures and marks on the wall... originally titled Textured Wall marks #1 and #2, both of them sold; one to a friend. And her family suddenly discovered a little girl in a white dress in my wall marks. First I was chuffed, how nice: I can paint people unintentionally. But then it losts its appeal. That little girl was all I could see. EVERY SINGLE TIME. How irritating. That favourite red/white spot of colour in the painting had become something concrete other than a red/white spot of pigment.

Textured Wall #1
Soft pastel on board, 50x70cm

Luckily, she disappeared after a while again. Phew...

The field of bluebells and the little girl in a white dress make me both doubtful that I should be intent on filling those blanks, gaps, voids and hesitations in. And it's those moments that I'm very glad to have Irene there to pull the looking/seeing back to fields of colours.

So, no, Rothko most definitely NOT paints horizon lines. I am pretty certain of that.... I think.

Hilltop or the ocean

I find that the process of photographing pieces is always a useful one. In it's deceptive objectification the photo allows me to step a foot away from the piece - as if time has passed between painting and a new looking at it.

So, with the ACEOs something struck me. And it was again the line that kept me looking at it - the horizon line. And I wondered what the difference was between a hilltop against the sky or the line where the sea meets the horizon. And I remembered how Twombly's Poems to the Sea all have a ruler-drawn horizon line - the only straight line, the same throughout all 24 poems.

Where the sky meets the sea - the line - where it all happens - the Wild.

Then I played some more with the wild line in the distance: masked off the lower part of the board and painted in the sky. Played with the way the pigments come up, close to the line, touch it, or not quite.

Hilltops, oceanlines or fields of colour. Here are three more (seeing that I already sold two... thank you, P.!) for the Etsy shop:

See Study ACEO #6
Soft pastel on board, 8.9x6.4cm


See Study ACEO #7
Soft pastel on board, 8.9x6.4cm


See Study ACEO #8
Soft pastel on board, 8.9x6.4cm