The Sun at foggy morning 2019

Curator: Alfred Freddy Krupa's ink drawing from 2019, "The Sun at foggy morning", greets us with… Well, what's your initial impression? Editor: Ethereal. Melancholy, almost. The stark ink against the pale background makes it feel like a memory fading, or a whispered secret. The sun, that small, almost lost circle... Curator: The title juxtaposes with the abstraction. It begs us to consider the production of art within a natural setting. The marks suggest gestural urgency; consider the labor involved in a single stroke, the immediate capture of a fleeting moment. Editor: Urgency, yes, but also surrender. Like trying to grasp smoke. Is it a landscape, really, or a feeling of one? It's beautifully unrefined, those drips and smudges... a bit like capturing what’s truly there: uncertainty and a bit of mystery. Curator: Absolutely. The materiality – ink on paper – enables an immediacy difficult to achieve with more laborious media like oil on canvas. It becomes less about replicating the landscape and more about presenting the act of sketching. It questions art's societal value; is a rough sketch less ‘art’ than a finely rendered painting? Editor: That simplicity, though, that's where its power lies. It sidesteps pretension, doesn't it? Offers a raw glimpse into a mind trying to capture light. And this reminds me of sumi-e paintings with minimalist features; yet those were sometimes very pricey for feudal lords back in medieval Japan. The ink itself is doing so much. Curator: And think about the consumption of this image, both in its initial creation and now. Ink, even in 2019, carries the weight of artistic history, its deployment invites a discussion of our role in that continuity, in cultural sustainability even. It asks questions about accessibility. Is it art's role to depict only beautiful, well-rendered objects or should it be showing experiments with simple raw materials to challenge boundaries? Editor: Right! I guess I saw the feeling first, the technique second, while you flipped the script, talking about what stuff does. But looking closer? The sketch does echo a whisper on foggy days – so maybe Krupa snagged both. Thanks. Curator: A potent, quick, and powerful lesson; I enjoyed discussing with you, thanks!