This summer I went to a camping trip to a surreal village named Slavyanka. I lived in a tent just meters from the seashore and absorbed ever changing nature around me. At the moment of my arrival and setting up the tent the weather was foggy, so I managed to fully appreciate the hills, called ‘sopkas’ by locals, only the following morning. I immediately fell in love with the scenery and made my first fast plein air sketch before breakfast.
During the day, I’ve made a life drawing of my mom and a few sketches of surrounding sopkas.
The weather changed drastically from hot sunny afternoon to a heavy downpour and to a cloudless sky again, just in matter of a couple of hours! And after long meditation on the green and bare sopka I finally saw it in its genuine colors – violet and pink! I cannot explain it, but the nature thrived around me and I felt that that this sopka must be immortalized in pink and magenta! The pink sky in the evening confirmed that the choice of pink was brave but the right one.
The next day I’ve continued working on a variety of my plein air pink sopkas.
My main ambition during this trip was to continue working with a big format indigo watercolor landscapes, the series I started in August 2021. But unfortunately the weather was too windy to work with such a big format, therefore I’ve managed to make only two large scale watercolors, instead of twelve I planed to make. But the second one, inspired by David Hockney’s watercolors, turned out to be inspiring. Look at that happy face!
