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Tag: field watercolor

Relic

I look away from my paintings, from my exhibition. My eyes roam the room and glance over the stuffed animals of the “Vår Natur” (“Our Nature”) exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Stavanger. Among them, a wolf. But unlike the other animals here, this one doesn’t stand proudly. The taxidermists have not rendered the

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Keeping the breach open

” Peregrine falcon in the distance in the heat haze. As is often the case in this kind of situation, I draw too big. It is small, too small, in the eyepiece of my spotting scope. However, I paint it large on my sheet of thirty by forty centimeters. The usual consequence is that I

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Open circle

« As soon as you see something,you already start to intellectualize it.As soon as you intellectualize something,it is no longer what you saw. » Shunryu SuzukiSeptember 8, 1967 As enigmatic and obscure this quote may seem, it is a very powerful description of the main predicament the drawer-from-observation is facing. He wants to paint his

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Sad necessity

« One death for one life, a fundamental principle of life on Earth. A sentence which can be delayed, which can give the illusion of being circumvented, but which, whatever form it takes, will always end up falling. It is the necessity imposed by a finite world, our planet, on which life has sought to fill

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Vodka season

It’s Christmas and New Year’s time, but I must admit that the most important date for me remains the Winter Solstice. It happens around December 21st, the date of entry into winter on our calendars, and corresponds to the shortest day and therefore the longest night of the year. From there, the days start to

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To the East

I live inbetween two worlds. To the west, the coast. The plains open to the horizon, the beaches, the fields and the lakes which welcome a whole diversity of birds which are easily observed from the road. One searches with excitement for the unexpected rarity. To the east, the mountains. The forests that close the

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With a great deal of patience and prudence

I open my eyes with all my strength. After an hour long nap, I wake up groggy, with a blurry vision and a heavy head. Laying in the grass with my head on my backpack, my eyes are filled with blue sky and my ears full of the silence of this heat. Even the sea

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A small meter of ice

What is happening before a Polar Bear sketch ? Well, a lot of time watching. From the boat, we spend hours, days, alone or in teams spotting the white. The white ? Big mistake. Pretty much nothing is white up there, and definitely not the snow. It is a blend of blues and greys, with an

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Chouette hulotte- Norvège - 2020

The observed watcher

It is last Wednesday. I am going for two days in the mountains, the same mountains where a few weeks ago I discovered an elk. I want to see it again but after the first day : nothing ! I have wandered all around the area : not a single animal. Maybe everybody is sheltering

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