Sky Zone

A piece of night sky in pen and ink: blue clouds against a darkness that reads as black, the moon caught in their edges, snow specks swirling between them with a soft, diffuse glow.

I called it a zone deliberately. A zone is a piece cut from something larger, fenced off for a purpose. In my hometown there was a closed military zone — people worked there, but no one spoke of what they did. The edges of this paper are that fence: they fence off a patch of the endless sky.

That was the real problem to solve. How do you draw something with no beginning and no end? The clouds saved me. They at least have contours, a mass that seems finished — though the sky is never still. Wind, snow, light keep moving it. I froze one moment.

An original pen-and-ink drawing. Signed.

Jolanta Johnsson