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Tag: 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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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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At the doorstep

“Identification is only the front door to naturalism and I have the feeling of having remained at the doorstep. All my life, I’ve made lists. I identified, bird after bird, by the hundreds, by the thousands, learning along the way some facts about their biology. But what do I really know about the life of

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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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Pale Blue Dot

Twenty-three years after launch from Earth, the Voyager 1 spacecraft reaches the boundaries of the Solar System. On February 14, 1990, six billion miles from us, it opened its cameras one last time for one final look back. Sixty images, sent pixel by pixel across space to be patiently collected on Earth. Then six planets

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Chrono – logical

Time has this strange habit of passing as it pleases, varying according to circumstances. It’s 9:00 pm. In this small village lying at the end of a fjord, I shut the car door and start the climb. It’s already late. I hope to get there before the clouds… Midnight: I’m in my sleeping bag, lying

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Naturalist Synesthesia

For a moment, my zodiac’s passengers no longer exist. I’m immediately cutting off the boat engine, I don’t want to hear a single noise. Before me, my colleagues continue their slalom in this maze of islands and icebergs in this far corner of the East coast of Greenland. Eyes fixed on this inlet opening up

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