Fuerteventura Landscapes: Drawing Volcanic Ground

In dry island air there is almost no atmospheric perspective. Distant hills stay nearly as dark as near ones, which removes the landscape painter's usual method of pushing space back with pale blue.

The alternative is value and texture. Near ground is drawn with granulating pigment that separates on the paper into visible grain; far ground is laid in flat. The eye reads texture as proximity, and the space opens up without a single cool wash.

Lava black, burnt umber, raw sienna, iron oxide red and the white of the sheet. Green appears rarely and never brightly. The palette was chosen by walking, not by theory — these are the colours you have on your boots at the end of the day.

Because the pigments granulate, they do most of the descriptive work by themselves. Painting volcanic scree stroke by stroke is a losing battle; letting the paint behave like the ground is not.

Canarian ermitas are vernacular building at its most reduced: thick rubble walls, lime render, a bell arch, and a door turned away from the prevailing wind. Nothing is ornamental because nothing could be spared.

Drawn beside a volcanic slope, a chapel becomes a unit of measurement. Reduce it to a small white mark and the hillside behind it suddenly has a real size — that single relationship is the subject of most sheets in the collection.

Fuerteventura is one of the windiest places in the Atlantic. Grit lands in wet washes, paper flexes, and any attempt at a controlled gradient fails.

So the technique adapts. Washes go down in short, decisive passes; the sheet is worked flat and low; and the grit that arrives is left where it lands. Some of the texture in these prints is genuinely the island, which is a better outcome than a clean sheet would have been.