Chapter Five
A Series of Paintings
Gold Dust
Where memory slowly turns into light.
Some places become quieter after you leave them. Not because they disappear, but because memory slowly lets go of their details.
What remains is light. Years after studying the paintings of the Dutch East Indies, I realised it wasn't their stories that had stayed with me. It was their atmosphere. Their golden stillness.
These works are painted from that distance. Using antique gold, Payne's Grey, and as little as possible—allowing memory to do what memory does best:
leave only what matters.
I. Bingin
I thought I was painting another wave. Looking back, it was the first painting in Gold Dust. Until then, gold had only appeared in fragments. Here, it stopped being an accent and quietly became the world the ocean belonged to. I wasn't trying to leave blue behind. I simply found myself following the light.
Gold is not a colour. It is a direction.
From the studio journal, March 2023
II. High Tide
Memory doesn't preserve landscapes. It preserves the feeling of wanting to return.
Balangan, 2012
III. After Noon
Wasn't looking for another landscape. Was looking for the feeling that made me stop walking.
IV. 6 A.m. at Central Java
Modern world is a strange place. Before going anywhere, you could virtually ride the streets with google maps, look some photos via instagram, listen for stories of people, who already visited it and create kinda image of this place.
Sometimes expectations are too high.
And sometimes reality beats them all.
I heard and read lots of thing about Java. Almost everyone, who i spoke told that its super inhabited, poor, unsafe, messy..
My close friend even described it as "The pain of soul".
One moment I decided to feel that pain, just to see another kind of reality.
And standing in the heart of most inhabited and most explosive island in the World, the only feeling, overloading me, is harmony.
With people around, with nature, with world and with myself....even tho my self condition wasn't perfect at all.
At that very moment I thought about phrase heard somewhere - "Bali is the morning of the World". With all love I have to this magic island, it's not Bali, it's Java
VI. Morning Glory
Sumbawa wakes quietly.
Before the heat. Before the roads fill with people. Before the island remembers the day.
For the few minutes, the light belongs only to the water.
VII. Still Here
Some paintings begin in the studio. This one began on a cliff above Indian Ocean.
Single Fin, Uluwatu
Dance Me To The End Of Love ( Dude Skywalker Latin Lover Edit)
Behind the canvas
Small moments, details, and following the light.
Gold ground, early stage
Payne's Grey, wet on wet
Palms at dusk
Cliff study, detail
The light kept moving inland.
So did I
Next Chapter
Higher Ground