Blue Bird I, II, III, IV

2024
Organic pigment and tea on Fabriano paper
23 x 30,5 cm

These drawings lie somewhere between a northern sea, a Dürerian melancholy, and a Chinese landscape. Fundamentally, however, they are about the ocean: its simultaneously soft, inviting surface and unfathomable, terrifying depth. Their title refers to a folk ballad by the Swedish troubadour Evert Taube—“Tie the Swede to the rudder, he can steer through the mist…to the wheel of Blue Bird that was doomed to sink”—about a shipwrecked brig whose sailors, upon rescue, remember their forgotten helmsman, the son of their rescuer: ‘And the captain stood up; he was gray, he was worn. The storm howled; one could hardly hear his words…‘Karl was tied to the helm, and forgotten on board.’”