Collection N° 04
Black rock, white lime, and a wind that has been shaping the island since before anyone drew it.
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Fuerteventura is the oldest of the Canary Islands and it looks it. Wind has taken the volcanic cones down to soft shoulders; there are stretches where the only vertical thing for a kilometre is a whitewashed chapel or a dry-stone wall. For an artist trained to look for structure, that emptiness is not a problem — it is the subject.
The Fuerteventura work is the most expressive in the archive. The line loosens, the wash gets darker and more granular, and the palette narrows to lava black, ochre, rust and lime white. What holds it together is still architectural thinking: a chapel is placed on the sheet the way it is placed on the hillside, with the land doing the work of supporting it.
There is also a human story running underneath. These are small buildings made by people with almost no material to work with, in a landscape that offers no shelter. Drawing them is a way of noticing that persistence — the same instinct that draws an abbey in France, applied to something a hundredth of the size and a fraction as celebrated.
As prints, the Fuerteventura pieces are the strongest in the archive at large sizes. The granulation in the volcanic passages only fully appears above A2, where the pigment settles the way it did on the original paper.
Volcanic terrain resists conventional landscape technique. There is little green to break up the field and almost no atmospheric perspective in dry air, so distance has to be described by value alone. The solution across this collection is granulating pigment — earth colours that separate on the paper and imitate the grain of the ground itself.
Working conditions matter too. Wind carries grit onto wet paper, and rather than fight it the drawings accept it. Some of the texture in these pieces is genuinely the island.
The small ermitas of Fuerteventura are vernacular architecture at its most reduced: thick rubble walls, lime render, a bell arch, a single door facing away from the prevailing wind. They are drawn here without romance, as working buildings that have survived because they were built correctly.
Prints from this series suit interiors with texture — plaster walls, natural stone, warm neutral palettes — and hold their own in bright rooms where softer watercolour work can wash out.
Ink and wash on paper · Fuerteventura, Canary Islands
A whitewashed chapel dug into a volcanic slope, drawn on location in the Canary Islands. Lava blacks and ochres against lime white — a landscape print with real weight, best appreciated at large scale.
Ink and wash on paper · Atlantic coast
The other side of island life: a boat out of the water, waiting. A calm counterpoint to the volcanic interior work and a natural companion print.
