Wild Dawn on the River Lek / 2026
Eggtempera on paper - H.39 x W.23 cm.
Wild Dawn on the River Lek emerges from an encounter with the river at first light — that fragile, electric threshold where darkness loosens its grip and the landscape has not yet decided what it will become. The Lek at dawn is never still. It breathes, shifts, and resists containment. I wanted to capture not a literal view, but the sensation of standing at its edge as night fractures into morning.
Working in monotype allows for both control and surrender. Ink is pressed, lifted, scraped, and disrupted; textures form through pressure, accident, and erasure. The marks mimic the river’s own gestures — currents carving into silt, wind scoring the water’s surface, reeds bending under invisible forces. The white spaces are not emptiness but light breaking through, dissolving mass into atmosphere.
The composition moves between turbulence and stillness. Dark, organic forms suggest banks, trees, or shadowed water, while fractured highlights cut across the surface like the first sharp glint of sun. The rawness of the print — its scratches, smudges, and splatters — reflects the untamed character of the river and the immediacy of working outdoors in memory, if not in body.
This piece is less about landscape as location and more about landscape as experience. Dawn is a moment of becoming. In that wild, uncertain light, the river feels both ancient and newly born. Through abstraction, I seek to hold that fleeting transformation — where chaos resolves into clarity, and the day begins with quiet intensity.
Bram Herens - Schoonhoven