CHAPTER IV

Blue Me Away

Bali · Indonesia · Australia
2016 – 2022

It started with a pair of blue eyes.
Or maybe with the ocean. I am no longer sure.

Somewhere between Bali and Australia, the two became impossible to separate.

Without noticing, I began following that colour. Sun-faded turquoise.

Across countries. Across coastlines. Across canvases.

Maybe that is why blue never felt like just a colour. It felt like a way of seeing.

Crush — mature abstract wave painting in deep blue and turquoise, visual anchor of the Blue Me Away series — Crush · Acrylic on canvas · 50×70 cm · 2016

BALI · 5:00 AM · OIL PASTEL · SUN-FADED TURQUOISE · EYES → COLOUR → WAVE · INDONESIA → AUSTRALIA

THE FIRST WAVE

I thought I was trying to draw a colour. It curved into a wave before I understood what was happening.

I woke before sunrise.

Maybe it was jet lag. Or maybe it was simply an old habit — the kind you carry across oceans without knowing why.

My dog was only a year old then. He liked spending the night outside and treated sunrise like the end of his shift. Around dawn, he would ask to come home and immediately go to sleep.

I stayed awake.

There was a sheet of paper nearby and a box of oil pastels. A Claes Rosen remix of Marvin Gaye's "If This World Were Mine" was playing in my head since the day we met.
Not butterflies, more like a full super-set crashing right onto my head - you know the kind. salt. laughter, messy hair, everything too loud and too blue in the best possible way.

I wanted to capture a colour I could not forget.

Sun-faded turquoise. The eyes of someone who had spent years looking beyond the horizon and knew how to read water.

I was not trying to paint the ocean. I was trying to paint that particular blue.

The shape curved, gathered movement and turned into a barrel before I realised I was drawing a wave.

That morning became the beginning of Blue Me Away.

First pastel wave sketch on paper, surrounded by oil pastels and drawing materials — ORIGIN ARTIFACT 01 5:00 AM. Oil pastels, a sleepless morning, and the first shape of Blue Me Away.

Warm ambient light on a music player — the soundtrack playing when the first wave appeared — ORIGIN ARTIFACT 02 The soundtrack playing when the first wave appeared.
Marvin Gaye — If This World Were Mine
Claes Rosen Remix

Artwork 01 — First conceptual wave painting in oil on canvas, the origin of the Blue Me Away series

The Sea I Have Yet to Meet

Acrylic on canvas. 90*70cm

2017

I had never seen this water
Somehow, I already missed it

I was thinking of Sumatra. Of Mentawai.
At the time, it felt like the far edge of the imaginable world — remote, untamed, and slightly frightening in the way only truly beautiful places can be.
I had not seen that sea yet. That was part of the pull.
This painting was my way of moving closer to it — to its distance, its danger, and its impossible beauty — before life ever took me there.

Artwork 02 — Deep blue abstract ocean wave in mixed media

BLUE ME AWAY

60*80cm. Acrylic on canvas. 2016

The wave was no longer in front of me.
I was inside it.

Artwork 03 — Turquoise abstract ocean composition in mixed media

SCAR REEF

50*70cm, Acrylic on canvas, 2019 Private collection, Spain

Sumbawa was never soft. Its beauty came with consequence.

I remember Sumbawa as a place where everything beautiful seemed to have teeth.
Somewhere along the way I was robbed — money, jewellery, bag, gone.
There were dawn ferries, an absurd argument over a T-shirt, and enough hours on a scooter between Bali, Lombok and Lakey to temporarily lose all feeling in my ass.
Somehow, I also came back with an eleven-kilo giant trevally. That feels about right for Sumbawa.
The reef gives the wave its shape and waits underneath it at the same time. The island did something similar: it offered beauty without ever pretending beauty was safe.
Scar Reef is my memory of that bargain — blue water, burnt gold, sharp edges, and absolutely no interest in being gentle.

Narrow tropical path leading toward a surf break in Bali, Indonesia — Uluwatu.
Fine Art Photography

Indonesian coastline with a distant wave breaking on the horizon — Sumbawa, Indonesia

Fishing boat on calm ocean waters at dawn, Indonesia — Currents.
Fine Art Photography.
2017. Flores, Indonesia

Indonesia never felt like one place to me.
Bali was the first door. Flores felt like a lost world: dark water, moonsoon green and boats leaving before dawn.
Sumbawa was rougher - long roads, empty coastlines, villages, ferries and the growing suspicion that comfort had been left several islands behind.
I keep returning because no island ever explained the next one.

Sumbawa 2019. The fins were size 43. My feet is 38. The fish weighed 11kg. The rest of the trip was equally reasonable.

Underwater close-up of a large fish with scales and fins, captured in turquoise water

Coastal landscape photograph with islands and ocean horizon

Snorkeler with blue snorkel mask in tropical waters looking at marine life

Wide panoramic beach view with rolling waves and dark rocky coastline

Close-up of weathered white and orange stone on pebble beach

Overhead view of ocean waters with visible underwater reef formations

Fisherman holding large silvery fish with red tail fin on beach

Snorkeler in ocean with islands visible in background landscape

Artwork 04 — Large-scale abstract teal wave, immersive full-width composition

IN THE SEA OF PEOPLE MY EYES WILL ALWAYS LOOK FOR YOU

70*90cm. Acrylic on canvas. 2018

I painted the gaze, not the face. The ocean did the rest

He had a habit of disappearing into places that made me nervous.
Remote islands. Long crossings. Open water. Trips that later returned as stories about storms, exhaustion and almost not making it back.
I knew this was part of what I loved about him. I also hated it.
I could never decide whether the ocean was where he looked most alive or simply the thing most capable of taking him away.
I could never make him stay. I could only keep looking.

INTERLUDE

Rage

Powerful painted landscape with bold colors and gestural marks

Let's be loud and clear, there's no secrets here

Nangandoro and the Secrets

Mixed medias, 50*70cm

2019

Not every wave was blue.
Some arrived red.

I had mistaken intensity for certainty.
Then something I had already imagined as a future collapsed almost overnight.
I remember going underwater and holding my breath for as long as I could — not to disappear, just to find few seconds in which nothing could reach me..
I didn't work for long. Grief was embarrassingly mobile. It find me at the beach, a massage table, a fitting room.No dignity. No timing.
Nangandoro came from that pressure. Blue began to fracture. Red entered the work. Gold no longer felt luminous; it looked like something beautiful already starting to burn.
This paintings is not simply about anger. It is about the moment desire becomes too powerful to remain beautiful

Midnight Reef

Acrylic on canvas.
50*70cm
2018
Private collection, Spain

Expansive Australian outback horizon at golden hour, sparse landscape — Bali, Indonesia

Coastal rocks meeting the ocean horizon in Western Australia, minimal composition — The Promenade.
Fine Art Photography
Western Australia 2020

Artwork 06 — Final and most mature wave painting, the visual culmination of Blue Me Away

Windy

oil, canvas

2021

The wave passed.The blue remainded.

Mid-february on Rottnest.
TBy then, blue had followed me for years — through paintings, islands, airports, arguments, departures and returns.
I still thought I knew what it belonged to.
That day the ocean was almost absurdly simple: wind, white water, a flat horizon. Nothing dramatic happened. Maybe that is why I remember it.
I painted Windy later and realised the colour no longer needed a story to justify itself.
The wave could pass. The blue could stay.

Monumental painted landscape — culminating visual statement of Blue Me Away series

Beneath the surface of this linear abstraction lies the memory of the wave.

A reef break somewhere between stillness and velocity.

Bright blue and muted gold trace the motion of water - not as it looks, but as it feels.

Sharp angles meet soft gradients. The image breathes like swell.

This work is a map of sensation - drawn from days on the Mentawai coast, where surf becomes trance, and silence becomes form.

For years I could not tell where the blue came from. The ocean. A pair of eyes. An island. A memory.
Eventually it stopped mattering.
The places changed. The people did too. The colour survived them all.
What began as something I was trying to hold became the way I saw.
The blue remained.
By then, it was mine.

Some eyes do not reflect the sea.
They remember it.

One colour became a direction.
Then a habit.
Then a way of seeing.

NEXT CHAPTER

Gold Dust

What remains after the light has gone