The Inevitability of Being

This painting, more than three metres wide, came into being quite unexpectedly and from a very concrete invitation.

When Johannes Valdma called me and told me about the summer production „Kuuvalgel“ and that a large abstract painting was needed for the staging, my first thought was that the timing was completely wrong. And probably for exactly that reason I knew rather quickly that I would do it. Because why not.

I did not want to paint the production itself, nor to tell the same story with the painting that is told on stage. I was far more drawn to the feeling the story carries within it: the longing for closeness, vulnerability, trust and the courage to open up to someone.

With an abstract painting it is always important to me that not everything can or should be put into words. The painting must be allowed to remain itself. Here too, I did not want to dictate to the viewer what they should see or feel in it.

This painting is large. More than three metres wide. Standing in front of such a format, painting becomes physical as well. You no longer work only with your hand and a brush, you move inside and around the painting itself. And yet in this work I deliberately also used a very small brush. It was exactly this contrast that began to interest me: an enormous surface and, within it, small, slow decisions.

And now that this giant is finished, I am sincerely glad that it will not stay only in my studio, but will become, for a while, part of an entirely different world.

In August the painting is part of the stage design of the summer production „Kuuvalgel“ at Haapsalu railway station.

For me there is something very beautiful in that. A painting that was not born as an illustration for a production now begins, in its own way, to speak along with that story on stage.