Time of the Year

I have always had a particular love for green.

Not simply green as one colour, but green as an entire world of colour. Deep forest greens, yellow greens, olive, moss, emerald, blue green, muted greens softened by distance and the almost luminous greens that appear when sunlight finds its way through a canopy.

Green is never really one thing. It is constantly shifting, depending on light, weather, season and time.

I often find myself looking down from a high vantage point, seeing a landscape spread out beneath me. From above, a forest can become almost abstract. Trees lose their individual identities and merge into layers of colour, texture, shadow and movement.

What might look like a single field of green from a distance reveals an extraordinary complexity when you begin to really look.

This changing landscape became the starting point for “Time of the Year”.

The work began with a forgotten collection of oil paints that had been sitting in a box for many years. Opening it felt like opening a small archive from another period of my life. Among the tubes was an unexpected abundance of greens. More greens than almost any other colour.

Looking at them, I began thinking about just how many versions of green exist in nature and how the same landscape can transform completely as the day moves from morning into afternoon and evening, or as one season gives way to another.

While working, I listened repeatedly to Satsumaa by Amsterdam musician Wouter Veldhuis, with the fifth track becoming part of the rhythm of the painting.

I began with yellow green acrylic, then gradually introduced oils, allowing the colours to build, merge and disappear into one another.

From there, I stopped trying to control the painting.

I wanted to experience it rather than decide what it should become. I allowed the music, the colours and my intuition to lead, putting rational thought aside and responding to whatever appeared on the surface.

The brush became almost an extension of that response, moving through the painting without a predetermined destination.

I wasn't trying to paint a particular forest or landscape. Instead, I was searching for the feeling of looking down upon one. That sensation of seeing an immense living landscape from above, where trees, shadows, sunlight and changing seasons become a constantly shifting tapestry of greens.

Perhaps that is why the title Time of the Year feels right to me. The work is not about one particular moment. It is about change. About how nature continually reinvents the same place through light, weather and season.

The painting came together in only a couple of hours, but the idea behind it feels much older. It comes from years of looking closely at nature, of noticing things that can easily be overlooked, and of allowing those observations to settle somewhere inside me until they eventually find their way onto the canvas.

As with my brain scratches, I never really know where the process will take me. I have learned to trust that uncertainty.

For me, painting is still an act of discovery.

I put aside what I think I know, listen, look and respond. Somewhere between music, memory, colour and intuition, something begins to emerge.

Making the invisible visible is what continues to excite me.