A watercolour of a cliff face in the Apuseni mountains painted in late spring when the limestone is colonised by mosses and small ferns and the overall impression is of a green wall rather than a rock face. The painting is primarily a study in the colour green in all its variants.
Fourteen different greens were counted in the original subject, from yellow-green in full sunlight to blue-green in shadow. The watercolour medium, which naturally produces variation in wash, was the right choice for a subject in which variation is the only available content.
About the artist
Oana Petrescu uses the transparency of watercolour to generate ambiguity — the layered washes allow her surrealist imagery to feel genuinely uncertain rather than arbitrarily strange. Her paintings often depict landscapes in which something is slightly wrong: a horizon at the wrong height, a building casting a shadow in the wrong direction, water that flows upward.
She studied in Bucharest and continued in Barcelona, where the Spanish surrealist tradition was a significant influence. She is now based in Oradea, working in a studio she describes as too small and too cold — conditions she considers productive. She does not accept commissions.
