Chapter 2 — Week 2 — Outcome
Chapter 2: Escape
Week 2 Prompt was - Describe somewhere, real or imagined, that offers an escape from daily life.
Day 1: “Walking on the pan in Deadvlei, near Sossosvlei, Namibia.”
Dispatched to: S.E, Laren, Netherlands
Sometimes I make random trips using Google Street View - exploring far-flung places in the world. So now I’m wandering the pan in Deadvlei, Namibia. But rather than simply paint the desert scene, I also painted the mechanism that gave me access to it: the information panel, rating, icons, map inset, navigation marks. The result is a place of escape seen at a distance, already mapped and indexed, then slowed down again through painting.
Day 2: “A good work of fiction”
Dispatched to: A.H, Écully, France
Here, I use pages from one of Simenon’s novels, but not to illustrate the story as such. By removing the page numbers and headings, the text loses its indexed order and becomes a broken surface across the canvas. The redactions make the story impossible to read in a straightforward way. Instead, you have to work through fragments: Emma, a yellow dog, weapons, poison, fear. In that sense, you become a detective, trying to determine the story of a detective novel from damaged clues.
Day 3: “Travelling from Coron to El Nido, (Palawan, Philippines) on a six-day boat expedition exploring vibrant reefs, secluded beaches, and untouched islands, then sharing music around a bonfire with fellow travellers.”
Dispatched to: M. D, Sanremo, Italy
This observation immediately took me back to vivid memories of SCUBA diving on reefs in Barbados and Saint Lucia. Reefs have a particular hold on me: colour, movement, life, and the strange quiet of being suspended below the surface, where the body is released from its normal weight — an escape from gravity as much as from ordinary life.
Day 4: “A gushing sound of water flowing down in the forest river - chirping birds correlating.”
Dispatched to: S.B, Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire, UK
The observation starts with a gushing river, and I wanted that to be felt in the paint. I made the river thick, loose and dragged, almost thundering along the bottom of the image. The forest above is darker and denser, built with vertical strokes, as if holding the sound inside. The sky is much thinner. I scratched small marks into it, borrowing loosely from the idea of a spectrogram, so the bird chirps become signals within the paint rather than painted birds.