Hidden logic

High summer, green on every side, light breaking on the water — and the question of how to hold all of it on a square canvas.

Is there a logic hidden inside nature? I did not ask myself that question while I was painting this picture. I only wanted to set down what nature had done to me.

It was summer. Green surrounded me on every side. Trees, bushes, grasses — everything that could turn green had turned green. The sun was not sparing with its light. On the surface of the lake the waves kept flashing. It was the height of summer, with all its allurements, the season when every sense drinks in what is given. At that time of year we stand closest to nature. We want to go down into it, the way one goes into water.

I wanted to write those intense sensations onto canvas. And then, as always, the question arrives: how?

How do you take hold of that chaos of impressions and turn it into a composition on a square canvas?

Should I paint completely spontaneously? Bring in some other way of working altogether? Splash the paint? Or shoot at it, the way Niki de Saint Phalle once did?

My search went in another direction.

The logic underneath

I thought about the fact that this vital explosion of nature is governed by its own laws. And every one of those laws contains its own logic. Each plant grows from a seed, flowers, bears fruit — it is part of the life of nature. Animals hidden in the forest and in the grass, insects turning in the air. All of it lives according to a certain logic. A logic hidden from us.

So when I came to build the composition, I reached for geometric forms. They gave the picture its architecture. Geometry is a discipline with defined laws and definitions, and I decided that geometric divisions would carry my thought best. They also make an image of that logic concealed inside nature.

Between the divisions a tissue spreads out, built from small, wave-like touches of the brush. And alongside it, soft forms drift past.

Is that air and clouds? Is it water, and their reflection?

That I leave to you, my viewer.

See Hidden Logic in the gallery →

The painting is an original oil on canvas, signed, with a certificate of authenticity, and it exists only once.

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