From August 13 to September 4 2021 I worked on this piece: 80 blots in Prussian Blue nr 508. Every day I added one or more blots. A smudge or a stain, created by using a page of my little sketch book as a kind of brush. The idea is to grow a painting. Organic and without a plan. The result would be a layered cloud with dark and light coloured spots.
take a sketch book and a large piece of paper, a bottle of ink and make a drawing each day until you run out of sheets
This piece is solidified time. It has a conceptual, or fundamental base: ‘take a sketch book and a large piece of paper, a bottle of ink and make a drawing each day until you run out of sheets’. Where sheets are the pages of one sketch book. This sketch book has 80 sheets, hence the title: 80 blots.
Result is the sum of all those moments and thus represents time. Stacked time. Captured time. So this is the spiritual base of the work: it’s history and present at the same moment. It connects the viewer to what has been. Like any organic life form.
Of course, any painting is a trace of time. But in this case, that’s where the emphasis is – and it’s nothing else.
One or more blots each day. Random. Every day the same but yet different. Depending on the time of the day, the light, the mood, the energy of the day, the same action gets a different result. When wet, the color is bright. When dried the color gets darker.
The final image slowly emerges. Just like clouds that slowly gather in the sky, with an ever-changing composition.
With the last page of the sketch book it’s done. The piece is ready:
Watercolor (Ecoline) on one sheet of paper, 70*100 cm
Watercolor on 80 sheets, 10*14,9 cm
Ecoline bottle 30ml Talens 508.
One reply on “80 blots”
leuk idee Wim