The Process

The result was what it was so far; it was mostly about getting going and moving on. I started on the next one.

This time I wanted depth, twist and width. The black hole was laid at an angle and became an asteroid belt vanishing into the horizon. More shades of black gave more depth. I tried a new background. I used photo-editing software and made negatives of the images to learn about the pattern.

The paintings were nothing remarkable yet, still mostly sketches for the next. I tried turning the black hole again. Thought it might look like when you squint at a light. Like a cross and like a universe. The pink background got to stay. I now learned that space can be more than outer space. That it doesn't always make a difference whether you zoom out or in.

The next step was to twist the asteroid belt around its own axis. I painted it from the side and it screws itself into the painting. Like a twisted sheet of metal seen from the side, where the edge of the sheet stretches from corner to corner. This time against a pink background. Pink Matter.

Pink Matter took me forward in that I achieved a depth effect I hadn't managed before. Still nothing remarkable as a whole, of course, but a step forward.

I wanted to move beyond the notion of outer space by zooming in on Pink Matter. I failed and painted over it. It became something else. I now realized that every earlier painting was like a reminder note for the next. A starting point for the next direction. Something to remix. I liked how this one reaches outside the frame. It became like something real rather than a photograph.

An overpainted failure, but at least I learned that the painting turns flat and unnatural if the stones are all the same size with the same spacing. Variation!

The flatness had to go; the continuation outside the frame would stay. I tried adding a convex or concave by having larger elements in the middle. For some reason I got it into my head to mask the painting in a river-delta-like pattern. This I liked. The choice of color came after I photographed the ceiling and then inverted and edited the colors beyond recognition. The previous one felt like some kind of carbonation and this one like a fizzy-pop beer landscape in azure-blue water.

One covid day a leaf fell from my ficus tree; by chance I happened to hold it in front of a strong lamp. I caught sight of the veins in the leaf, it was beautiful. I thought it could take me further into the organic and decided to paint it with UV paint, maybe it could give a feeling similar to the backlit leaf. I painted without a UV lamp, I painted in the dark. Here I had to trust the process and paint without direct visual feedback. I liked it; it gave me the confidence to take larger blind steps between later paintings.

Now I wanted to sew together background and foreground, negative and positive. The idea was to let the negative have a direction; it got to screw itself inward toward the center of the painting as if you look down into a bowl. The positive and negative become related in that both have direction. The background now also got a pattern of its own that recurs in the negative pattern. I also let it be convex, so as to sew the three elements together.

I got a taste for it. The previous painting had something; it probably even became a work of art. I decided to see if I could take it further, tried to take as many leaps of faith as I could think of to lay background pattern and foreground pattern over and under each other at the same time. I had no clear idea at all how this would end up looking; I painted this one in the dark but trusted the process. The painting got to be called The Process.

I let the negatives circulate around the asteroids by giving them an orbit clear enough for the eye, the brain and the gut to fill in what isn't shown themselves. They become like moon belts around planets, or like DNA strands around their own axis. I liked how the painting became a now. All the layers hang together; you no longer see layers.

I decided to place the asteroids in a more dramatic perspective by coming much closer at the bottom of the painting and letting them be farther away the higher up the painting you cast your gaze. With each painting I became more meticulous about the black dots' relation to one another. No two dots shall be the same size beside each other. This painting became my favorite. I liked the warmth and the bubbling upward direction.

Now I wanted to make the pattern deeper by adding dimensions inward. Since brushes only get so small and I am only so steady of hand, it had to be a larger format. My paintings take a long time to paint. This one hung on display for over a year. I learned some from it but think I made more progress in a smaller format. That too was a lesson that can only be embodied through experience.

I was careless with the previous painting; I wasn't meticulous with every dot. It showed, and above all was felt in the eyes; I had it confirmed that the devil is in the details. With a sense of revenge I decided to be more meticulous than ever. It paid off and I was very pleased. Trees don't cut corners when they grow.

So far I had concentrated on the pattern and the composition. After loving criticism from my sister I want to be more careful in my choice of color. I found matte, saturated colors in a coherent scheme at the YSL museum in Marrakech. On top of that I had the world's blackest black and the world's whitest white for maximum contrast.

The latest paintings got more love color-wise. Copper in three stages. The nature of Sedona. Snowfall in the desert. I decided to try to make the next one more harmonious and deep, with a steeper fall inward and fewer elements. Less could be more. Color-wise I wanted to reach a garden, with roses, soil and grass.