Folding Into Blue
Some drawings arrive quickly. Others take years to understand.
This piece began during a life drawing session while I was living in Glasgow. At the time, it was only a partial study — an instinctive response to a curled figure resting on a striped bed. After the session, the drawing disappeared into a folder where it remained for almost three years, nearly forgotten.
Only later, after moving to Copenhagen, did I return to it with different eyes.
What originally interested me was not simply the figure itself, but the emotional deformation of the surrounding space. The bed bends unnaturally, the perspective slips, the blue stripes begin to feel less like fabric and more like emotional currents surrounding the body. I wanted the space to mirror an interior psychological state rather than physical reality.
The curled pose became central to the piece. There is something deeply human in the instinct to fold inward — somewhere between protection, exhaustion, intimacy, and isolation. The figure hides from the viewer while simultaneously exposing vulnerability. That contradiction interested me.
Blue became the emotional language of the work. Not a peaceful blue, but a blue carrying silence, distance, memory, and introspection. Against it, the warmth of the skin feels fragile and temporary, almost dissolving into the surrounding space.
While visiting a recent exhibition dedicated to Henri Matisse, I unexpectedly found myself drawn toward two paintings by Pierre Bonnard. Their intimate interiors stayed with me long after leaving the museum. I realised how much I am attracted to paintings where domestic spaces become emotional spaces — where colour and distortion communicate states of mind more than literal description.
Looking back now, this drawing feels connected to that idea.
What began as a quick life drawing in Glasgow slowly transformed, years later in Copenhagen, into something more personal: a meditation on withdrawal, tenderness, solitude, and the strange comfort of disappearing into colour.
