Plein air stays hold the brains only in the painting field. It seems the reality stops existing in its most common way. The special atmosphere of such practices brings thoughts in a complete world of painting.
It seems reality stops existing in its most common way. The notifications, the errands, the mental noise of ordinary life — all of it quietly dissolves. What replaces it is something harder to name but instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever lost themselves in a creative act. Time moves differently. An hour can feel like ten minutes, or ten minutes can stretch into something vast and unhurried.
The special atmosphere of such practices brings thoughts into a complete world of painting. Everything becomes a potential composition — the way afternoon light falls across a hillside, the shadow a single tree casts on uneven ground, the particular green that exists only in this field at this hour and never quite the same way again. You stop observing nature and start listening to it.
There is nothing from normal everyday life there. No deadlines wearing the face of urgency. No small obligations tugging at your sleeve. There is only nature, canvas, and paints — and the quiet conversation happening between all three.
A plein air stay is something like an escape from the world and, at the same time, a beginning of an immersion into one’s own self. Paradoxically, by stepping away from everything familiar, you find yourself more clearly. The stillness outside creates space for something to stir inside.
I need this state. I need it the way a musician needs silence before a performance — to clear the palette of the mind, to fill the well. These days outdoors, in direct dialogue with light and landscape, are feeding something that will soon find its expression in an entirely different setting: the studio. New ballerina paintings are waiting to be born, and I can already sense them taking shape somewhere in the background of these open-air hours. The movement, the grace, the tension between stillness and motion — it’s all here in nature too, if you look long enough.
One week of the two-week stay has already gone — and what a week it has been. Here are some of the conversations I had with nature. Not in words, but in color, light, and the quiet marks a brush leaves when the heart is paying attention.
