This past summer, I traveled to northern Iceland to immerse myself into art-making at the NES Artist Residency for a month. Filled with anticipation I had resolved to let myself be guided by the environment, its landscapes, people, flora and fauna.
After exploring sunny Reykjavik and its art offerings the weekend I arrived in Iceland, I took a bus north into changing weather. A strong sidewind from the east is often cause for trip cancellation, I’d learn upon arrival. Glad my bus driver braved the elements. It rained as well, and despite it being August, it would rain a lot during my time there. The fierce weather became the first inspiration for my explorations in Skagaströnd, a municipality with one church, one restaurant, one gas station, one supermarket with one cash register, and one museum—the Museum of Prophesy.
I set out to create outdoor watercolors with the sky as my water supplier. I laid sheets of paper on the ground, placed rocks on them, and applied watercolor paint from tubes onto the rocks for the rain to wash the paper with color through the night.The next day I’d remove the rocks. Gravity and the wind were my brushes. It had stopped raining that morning. The wind did the drying. The first piece that emerged I named “Rock Garden,” an evolution of what I had set in motion.
Surprised that not all the paint had washed off of the rocks, I felt the urge to scrub them clean before returning them to the gravely surroundings of our studio. Rather than doing so in a sink, I scrubbed the leftover pigments from rocks onto sheets of watercolor paper. Like in the Rock Garden painting no brush touched the paper, and gravity played a big role again. Instead of wind, kinetic energy released by the bristles of the scrub brush I used was the important driver in the creation of these paintings. I removed the rocks and allowed the puddles to air-dry. In cloud-watching the resulting images, one evoked the shape of a butterfly with a shaded wing and a lit wing, meeting up with a ptarmigan, a quail-like bird I had learned about the day before, climbing nearby Spákonufell, or Fortuneteller’s Mountain. The birds were roaming the mossy mesa overlooking the town, quietly pecking for food, oblivious to the human presence.
I felt a great sense of wonder in the processes of creating these largely unpredictable images—a partnership between the designer and the painter I am, seeding an idea with the spirit of an ancestor farmer, with the harvest being in the eye of the artist-editor for other beholders to assess its beauty and imagine stories on their own terms.
I am curious as to how these explorations will manifest in future creations. For now I’m delighted that both “Ptarmigan and Butterfly,” and “Rock garden,” as well as a third painting were selected to be included in the juried watercolor exhibition “Fearless Watercolors/Acuarelas con Cojones.”
Check out this link, and consider coming to the opening, Saturday, November 2nd.
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition
481 Van Brunt Street, Door 7, Brooklyn