Gray

I can only say this with a small amount of certainty, but I think that gray is my favorite color. This, at least, seems to be the case. My clothes are often grayish, my eyes are gray-blue, my floor is gray, as is the woodwork in my studio. The laptop I am writing this text on is gray, my hair will turn gray soon, and the pencils I use for my drawings are gray. Because I live in the Netherlands, the sky above my head is mostly gray, the blubber under my skull is a gray walnut-like hump, if I believed in things like an aura, mine would probably be gray, and if you burned me, my ash would be gray.

Maybe I don’t really dislike other colors but merely distrust black and white. It could be the case that the graphite, prevalent in my work, serves as a metaphor. No matter how soft graphite is, it will never result in total blackness. At the same time, paper is never entirely white (whatever that might look like). Hypothetically, the greyness in my work reflects a particular search, a not-knowing. Or is it more like a deeply rooted realization that feeling absolute certainty about some things is best to be avoided in specific cases? I could be mistaken, but it seems that being entirely opposed to, or fully in favor of, ideas is shortsighted at the very least and potentially dangerous.

However, I am probably wrong, because arguably, gray would not even exist if it weren’t for black and white. And besides that, how likely is it that we will be able to point out the nuance between the lightest grays if we don’t have white as a reference? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, would we not mistake a very dark gray for black if there isn’t actual black to distinguish it as different?

It might be best to think about this a little more, a little longer. Add another layer of graphite to increase darkness or perhaps take an eraser to lighten up areas. Who knows, I will end up at the extreme end of the spectrum in some parts. A process that is contemplative. I hope the work will present it as such.