Talking to a pebble : Reflections on materials and the spirit of places

This essay digests my connection to places, materials and my painting practice. It stablishes the link between the landscapes that exist only in memory. And the real places that I collect and that I carry with me, in the shape of a stone. Resulting in a new place that is created out of the two, the painting. I reflect on these topics in the form of a dialog. Sometimes internal, between me and myself. But other times this dialog involves the land, the material, the painting and me. It is an artistic choice to write this essay in a conversational and reflective form. But it is also an honest depiction of how I work in my studio and what goes inside my mind while painting or making pigments. This essay, and/or dialog that I am having while writing, helped me conclude the importance of working with a charged material in my practice. A material that is not less than it was before it became painting. The material transformed.In that way this essay states that for me a place is always a place, even when broken apart by chance or force or when transmuted by the alchemical processes of pigment making. But it also states that my paintings are places themselves, and not representations. And that an image comes to be a place, through what I describe as a ritual, and that is, the act of painting itself.