WRITING ON WATER

Writing on Water begins with a paradox. The attempt to inscribe perception onto something that will not hold a mark. Water receives and dissolves every trace. What remains is not the mark itself, but the moment of seeing, unstable, already changing.

The series began in Kiel in the early 1990s, growing out of sketches and watercolours made while sailing on the Baltic Sea. The paintings developed from close observation of water and light. Reflections moving across the surface, brightness and depth exchanging places, wind breaking the image before it could settle.

We are never outside the structure we observe. The sailor is never outside the sea, the painter is never outside the landscape. The work begins from that position, inside wind, surface, balance and light.

Rather than painting water as atmosphere or scenery, the work investigates what might be called structural water. Water becomes a reflective plane where light organises movement, depth and spatial tension across a continuous surface. The paintings do not describe waves, they observe the behaviour of light as it interacts with water.

Harbour environments reveal this structure particularly clearly. Quay walls, piles, hulls, breakwaters and horizon lines create stabilising planes against which the reflective surface becomes visible as a field of movement. Vertical reflections form rhythms almost like architectural columns, while horizontal harbour edges anchor the surface and hold it in tension.

The paintings participate in this optical system. Water, light, architecture and painting become interacting surfaces within one field. A painting functions as another plane within that environment, modulating space rather than illustrating it.

Over time, the work has moved toward increasing condensation. Earlier passages often weave many directional marks together to construct the reflective surface. Increasingly, the aim is to allow larger planes of light to emerge with fewer marks. Simplification does not remove complexity, it reveals the underlying structure more clearly.

Mediterranean harbour environments intensify these conditions. Strong lateral light produces harder contrasts and clearer planar relationships between water, stone, shadow and sky. Limestone cliffs, harbour walls and reflective basins create faceted surfaces where light divides space into planes. These conditions encourage a reduction of painterly means, allowing light itself to define the surface.

Writing on Water is therefore a study of structural water and structural light. Continuous surfaces in which reflection, movement and depth organise themselves into planar relationships. Reflection means both to mirror and to think, to see, and then to see again. The paintings follow that movement, a quiet attempt to hold, for a moment, what can never be fixed.