A winter thicket at dawn, when fog eats the colour and only the structure remains. Tall thin stems topped with dark, spiky thistle heads rise in a row from a pale silver-grey ground, and behind them vertical trunks almost dissolve into the air.
I wanted a cold that is not unpleasant but clean. The whole painting stays in one range — from white through pearl grey to a near-black navy — and only against that do the spiky heads become drawing. At the bottom the paint runs down in heavy drips, like melting ice.
A quiet, very graphic painting, the kind that changes with the light in a room.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 120 cm. This work has been sold; it stays in the archive to show where the paintings available today came from. Similar motifs are in the oil painting gallery.