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Reflections of an artist while painting

STONE, LIQUID, COTTON & LIGHT

AN ARTIST’S PHILOSOPHY

As I continue painting, my thoughts often drift beyond the subject on the canvas and into the philosophy of the materials I work with.

Stone — pigment from the earth

Oil colours originate, in one way or another, from the earth. Their pigments are derived from minerals, rocks and natural elements. In essence, when I paint, I am working with stone.

Stone on canvas.

Liquid — earth and time

And then there is oil — a substance whose origins reach back millions of years, to ancient organic matter buried deep beneath the earth. It brings a different dimension to the process.

My painting is therefore a meeting of two worlds: the solid and the liquid. Stone and oil. Earth and time.

Cotton — a sanctuary for imagination

The canvas, meanwhile, is a seemingly meaningless void.

A blank expanse of cotton, waiting to receive an idea that exists only in the artist’s imagination.

It allows that imagination to assume physical form. It bears the burden of the struggle between the artist’s vision and the stubbornness of the materials. It absorbs the uncertainty, the corrections, the failures and the triumphs.

The canvas protects the imagination from disappearing.

It is a shield.

The artist brings all three elements — canvas, oil and pigment — under control, gradually taming them into an expression of an imagined reality.

But even these three elements are incomplete without a fourth.

LIGHT.

Light — form, depth and emotion

Light is intangible. It cannot be held, shaped or possessed. Yet it is light that gives painting its true dimension.

It creates form out of emptiness, reveals texture, establishes depth and gives objects their presence.

More importantly, light creates emotion.

A lantern glowing in a dark room, sunlight falling across a quiet street, or the last rays of evening touching an otherwise ordinary landscape — it is light that transforms these moments into experiences.

Where a painting comes alive

Perhaps this is the greatest paradox of painting.

The artist works with stone, liquid and cotton to capture something that cannot be touched.

Light.

And somewhere in that encounter between the tangible and the intangible, a painting comes alive.

The canvas becomes a sanctuary for the artist’s fleeting imagination, rescuing it from oblivion and giving it permanence.