236. Raspberry and Kiwi ice cream (Himbeer- und Kiwieis)

236. Raspberry and Kiwi ice cream (Himbeer- und Kiwieis), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)

We came across Kiwi ice cream in Soest. It was greener than pistachio. However, it is actually still not really green at all. It is a strange murky color. It is much better than a straight green for painting! Look at something green and then look back at the kiwi ice cream here. See how it is more of a khaki, swampy brownish. Things in painting can really thrive on this kind of gristle, confusion and mess.

I work in a studio that is an old shop in the town. It has big windows on the street joining the marketplace to the train station. It is very exposed but I covered the area which shows where I work. There, I work with proximity to the people coming and going. Gradually, I have found that people are very respectful of the space. They leave me alone and I am grateful for the quietness (and change the painting in my window regularly as a contribution to the street). Tomorrow that all changes of course, when I open my door to everyone and make the exhibition public.

It is quite hard to move to a new country with a new language and re-start an art career for, I think, the third time (Perth, Melbourne, Perth, Germany). However, I think about the Japanese artist Hokusai. Apparently he moved and changed his identity eight times in his lifetime, even changing his name. He used anything at hand to make paintings, including his fingernails and hair. I am buoyed by his spirit of persistence. It’s necessary to think about it like this, otherwise it would be too difficult to go on, knowing the work that is involved in slowly generating a small and devoted audience for your work, not to mention building a studio with tools and art supplies. I have seen it as encouragment to also push my artwork further in its internal development both in terms of ideas and execution, as well as also moving it a little more in the direction of the audience. So, it ideally becomes both better made and better at relating to the average person, without too many fingerprints of the abstract mental preoccupations of the artist.

Hokusai could move around, adapt and devote his consciousness to catching the movements of a fish in ink, no matter what was happening in the background. Maybe I could do the same with melting ice cream I thought. It’s a challenge to get that coldness, the crystalline ice, with porcelain nearby also doing its own things. Plus, you want to get it right the first time. It is like building anything, like that. Do it right the first time! Put down a good foundation. Most of these paintings are already fixed in their development by my process of making and applying the gesso ground anyway. That is a bit like the volume dial for the entire composition. On top of a good gesso ground you can enjoy painting.