Chapter Five
A Series of Paintings
Gold Dust
Where memory slowly turns into light.
I don't remember when gold first entered the water.
The waves came first, and somehow gold was already there.
With the landscapes, I remember exactly.
In Java, I kept noticing old photographs and engravings in colonial interiors — images softened by age into the familiar brown-gold of sepia. At some point I thought: why sepia when there is gold?
It began almost as a visual impulse. Gold could do what sepia did — hold distance, age and atmosphere — but without pretending to be the past.
It reflected light. It changed as you moved. It refused to stay still.
So I began painting memories in gold.
Only later did I understand what I had been doing. Details disappear first. Places lose their edges, stories become unreliable, colours fade.
But something remains.
Sometimes, it catches the light.
I. Bingin
I don't remember why I put gold into the water.
I thought I was painting another wave. By then, gold had already begun appearing in fragments, but in Bingin it stopped being an accent and became the world around the wave
I don't remember deciding to put it there. That came later - the understanding, not the gold.
Gold is not a colour. It is a direction.
From the studio journal, March 2023
II. High Tide
Memory doesn't preserve landscapes. It preserves the feeling of wanting to return.
Balangan, 2012
III. After Noon
I wasn't looking for another landscape. I was looking for the feeling that made me stop walking.
I first noticed it in old images of Java - photographs and engravings reduced by time to sepia, shadow and light.
I wanted to know what would happen if sepia became gold.
The landscape changed. It stopped looking old and began to feel suspended somewhere between memory and light.
IV. 6 A.m. at Central Java
Modern world is a strange place. Before going anywhere, you could virtually ride the streets with google maps, look some photos via instagram, listen for stories of people, who already visited it and create kinda image of this place.
Sometimes expectations are too high.
And sometimes reality beats them all.
I heard and read lots of thing about Java. Almost everyone, who i spoke told that its super inhabited, poor, unsafe, messy..
My close friend even described it as "The pain of soul".
One moment I decided to feel that pain, just to see another kind of reality.
And standing in the heart of most inhabited and most explosive island in the World, the only feeling, overloading me, is harmony.
With people around, with nature, with world and with myself....even tho my self condition wasn't perfect at all.
At that very moment I thought about phrase heard somewhere - "Bali is the morning of the World". With all love I have to this magic island, it's not Bali, it's Java
VI. Morning Glory
Sumbawa wakes quietly.
Before the heat. Before the roads fill with people. Before the island remembers the day.
For the few minutes, the light belongs only to the water.
VII. Still Here
Some paintings begin in the studio. This one began on a cliff above Indian Ocean.
Single Fin, Uluwatu
Dance Me To The End Of Love ( Dude Skywalker Latin Lover Edit)
Behind the canvas
Small moments, details, and following the light.
Golden Hour. Padang Padang
6 am somewhere at Central Java
Dawn patrol
Sunrise over archipelago
The light kept moving inland.
So did I
Next Chapter
Higher Ground