Really?

I am wondering if I am really becoming a landscape painter and nature photographer. It is my truly something I can not stop doing. It keeps coming and requires no effort. I didn’t expect it. I use for the first time a “real” water paint brush. I bought on TaoBao (like Aliexpress but the one everybody uses in China). The brush is probably mediocre compared to real squirrel brushes but already I find even more pleasure in painting now, after years of Action brushes.

I sometimes long for a human or animal figure in these vast and empty landscapes. Yesterday I missed the human figure so much, that I painted just 2 figures as a landscape. I didn’t love it but I want to explore the figures. I used to paint them a lot. Sort of filmic lighting and anonymous persons.

I realise that all my image making might be related to cinema. I am not aware or sure about it, I just realise it when I look at all of it together and also when someone tells me. For example just now looking at the 2 figures immediately makes me think of a scene in a dark alley lit with white light, it looks louche, but it’s actually a very deep break up. A hand wants to be in a shoulder but it stays in a pocket. That kind of scene.

Sometimes I’m obsessed and I have movies in my head, potential scenes and conversations, perverse and violent, heart shattering scenes, blood, disgusting and also tender and heartbreaking scenes of children seeing objects being thrown in the house to their pregnant step mum. But then I just paint another blue landscape instead of writing it down.

I think it’s ok to not immediately translate this violent emotions (I think) or illustrate them with figuration immediately relating to it. I have to say I do sometimes write these things down in my notebooks, and it used to appear more in my “earlier” work.

Yes, I am old enough now to talk about my early period, my naive era. I don’t feel any need anymore to portray this parts in me anymore, the art making helped me through it and I still have to see a shrink one day, but I would say some still remains, the most close coming figuration to this theme would be gender exploration in my figures who often do drag, are demi sexuals and non binaries with femme and masc-tendencies depending on their moods, boots, wings, and nails. It’s not sex related but rather, gender. These figures sometimes appear in the landscape, pondering at the lake.

This one is not visibly in drag but the longing is there. All the organic matter around is sex neutral and can reproduce without another gender. Except for the tree in the back.

In this LomoAction camera inspired quattriptych (I just saw that camera on the website and I am hesitant to buy it) there is also a pondering figure on the hill. It’s me, pondering about not so painful decisions as in the past. Now the pondering is so beautiful ~ “what art shall I make?”

The most perfect thought to have on a hill.