Havskrumelur 2005

Rune Jansson made this watercolor painting, Havskrumelur, and the process feels immediate, the kind of thing you might do sitting by the sea. There’s a big sweep of blue for the sea itself, dragged horizontally across the paper. You can almost see the brushstrokes, one after another, building up the color. The paint is thin, so the white of the paper still shines through, giving it a luminous quality. Then, look at the lines scratched in on top. See how they interrupt the smoothness? It makes you think about the surface, about what paint can do. Then, there’s that little figure in the corner, sketched with a nervous energy. Jansson reminds me a bit of someone like Cy Twombly, in the way that they share a loose, poetic approach to painting. It's all about feeling and gesture, and it's less about perfect representation. Art is an open-ended conversation, after all.