About “ Floating Anchors”.

Coming from Belgium -”le plat pays” – (the flat land, as Jacques Brel used to sing it), I have always been fascinated by the Irish skies. They just are so wide, and wild, and alive, breathtaking…

At the tip of the Beara peninsula, where the land meets the wild Ocean, the Atlantic winds play a never ending game in the sky. They seem to have fun creating improbable clouds, painting 4 seasons in one day.

As I am looking up to the ever changing lights, the corner of my eye catches bits and pieces of the grounded things or beings around me. They are somehow anchors keeping me from flying too high.

They are grounded, but as I turn my head up and around, they become freer and dance into unusual compositions, floating in a corner of the sky.

I started to capture some of those fugitive slices of Irish sky in 2017.

The first title that came to my mind for my paintings was “Le Nez dans les Nuages”, litterally “the nose into the clouds” , a French expression that also means “ Daydreaming”.

I now feel “Floating Anchors” is the final title for that series of work, but I still keep the French initials NN on each individual piece.

The square shape of my paintings.

By instinct I choose squares, knowing that I could only catch a glimpse of the infinite clouds playground, but at least squares are as high as they are wide.

The medium, oil.

My intuition choose oil painting. On Arches paper or on board, I like the way the colours magically melt together and create the fluffiness of the changing sky as well as the different textures of my “anchors” elements.