House of now, 2023-24

My work often originates on location—in public spaces, remote cottages, urban environments, the countryside, or while traveling.

I consider my creative process as a visual diary in which I engage in dialogue with my close surroundings.

I use drawing as a playful method to keep looking at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. Closely observing-storing fragments or snippets of places and objects to playfully discover and rediscover pieces of my ever-changing daily surroundings.

drawing, painting, david wasch, research

Beneath the world seen at first glance, another begins to reveal itself.

As I actively observe, and start to look closer at the bottle of water in front of me, it starts to feel increasingly more vibrant and intense.

Through the layer of the otherwise ordinary brown café table, a deep red hue emerges, accompanied by green and purplish shadows I hadn’t noticed before.

The once-transparent bottle begins to reflect these vibrant colors.

Movement and color can't hold shape anymore.

During the drawing process, an in-between world emerges—one that doesn’t fully distort the reality I once perceived, but rather exists alongside it: a blend of my subjective perceptions in dialogue with the conceptual frameworks and traditional values I encountered earlier.

oil pastel on paper, 15 x 21 cm

Sometimes, the 'familiar' and the 'ordinary' are the hardest to grasp because we are so accustomed to them. This requires a continues conscious effort to distance myself from my familiar way of looking at the world. I often take the everyday for granted. But when I truly want to understand the ordinary, I try to approach it as if it were something strange, and slowly allowing the unfamiliar to become familiar again — this time, in a more vivid and intense way.

Merleau-Ponty,
The world of perception

Amsterdam, Netherlands 2024

Close-up

entering through our eyes,

the world arrives in the distance

mere shadows flitting across a blurred background

seeing things you might have seen before

a bottle of water, a person standing in the door
opening a window, a house

I feel i know them by heart.

but somehow I cannot make sense of it

until it descends

into my close environment

and transforms into an experience.

oil pastel on paper, 31 x 42 cm

In favor of criticism

Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person-you are always a different person -as are all your present "truths." being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm-something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet. -This is said in favor of criticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 307, The Gay Science.

oil pastel on paper, 88 x 57 cm

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why do we perceive things that are actually not there?

Or why are we not seeing things that are there?

Time flows, even if it seems like it doesn't change

The drawings of the tree trunks (on the left and at the top of this page) are still in progress. I started by sketching the trunk of a tree in Frankendael Park (Amsterdam) and plan to return daily to observe and document how the tree’s colors, forms, and overall appearance shift with the changing times of day, weather conditions, and light angles, as well as my own psychological and emotional state on that particular day.

In the story above (House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski) I read that when we enter an unfamiliar space for the first time, we approach it with heightened caution. This initial experience often makes the place seem much larger than it truly is. However, on a second visit, our familiarity with the terrain drastically alters our perception, revealing that the space is actually much smaller than we first imagined. For example, when you take a walk in an unknown park, city, or forest, it can feel vast and overwhelming. Yet, to return a second time to discover that the place is in fact much smaller than initially perceived.

When revisiting places we once frequented as children, it is not unusual to observe how much smaller everything seems. This experience is often attributed to the physical differences between a child and an adult. In fact it seems more to do with epistemological dimensions than with bodily dimensions. Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.

The idea that spaces feel larger or more mysterious when we first encounter them and then seem smaller with repeated visits suggests that our understanding of spaces evolves as we become more familiar with them.

Will the tree trunk, like the path in the park, seem shorter each time I return? Or do the light, weather conditions, and changing seasons ensure that everything feels new again—larger, more intense, and vibrant?

Naked Reality and the Tangible-eye

In many unnoticed moments, I filter everything through a symbolic lens of normality:

A collection of wood, fabric, and nails becomes a chair.
A million shades of whitish, gray-blue fluff condenses into a singular form we call snow.

But in moments of concentration shadows of grass on a book page can transform into tactile, almost fixed, colorful shapes.

and shadows on trees and plants seem to shift through a range of purples, blues, and grays, instead of simply gray or black. The place and subject become more tangible.

By staying in one place for a while and looking longer, I start to feel more present. The objective filter fades, allowing me to play with my perception and subjectivity.

A face, upon closer inspection, is not merely a face. It becomes a strange, shell-like form, where shadows cross in black and purple patches.

If you were to draw that face, someone might ask, 'What are those purple-black patches?' Yet they exist, visible in reality if you lift the curtain of objectivity just slightly, revealing naïve, purely material colors and shapes, stripped of symbolic meaning and learned forms or at least in dialogue with it.

Related experiment

Ithaca, USA, 2024

colored pencil, oil pastel and watercolor on paper, 88 x 57 cm

The Netherlands, 2024

Bahia, Brazil, 2024

colored pencil on paper, 21 x 30 cm

colored pencil and pastels on paper, 15 x 21 cm

The Netherlands, 2024

colored pencil and pastels on paper

21 x 15 cm

Vita femina

For seeing the ultimate beauties of a work, no knowledge or good will is sufficient; this requires the rarest of lucky accidents: The clouds that veil these peaks have to lift for once so that we see them glowing in the sun. Not only do we have to stand in precisely the right spot in order to see this, but the unveiling must have been accomplished by our own soul because it needed some external expression and parable, as if it were a matter of having something to hold on to and retain control of itself. But it is so rare for all of this to coincide that I am inclined to believe that the highest peaks of everything good. whether it be a work, a deed, humanity, or nature, have so far remained concealed and veiled from the great majority and even from the best human beings. But what does unveil itself for us, unveils itself for us once only. The Greeks, to be sure, prayed: "Everything beautiful twice and even three times! They implored the gods with good reason, for ungodly reality gives us the beautiful either not at all or once only. I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things~ But perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman.

Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 339, The Gay Science.

House of objects, Netherlands

In this series, I explore various objects, primarily houseplants, in my home and studio.

When I look directly at an object like the houseplant and it is in my field of vision, it appears larger than when it is located in the corners of my eyes.

In this project, I try to capture how these perceptions can shift when we become more attentive, curious, or emotionally engaged with a particular subject.

By playing with the scale of these objects, I aim to investigate the relationship between humans and nature, as well as the way we inhabit structured spaces like houses. The houseplants, as natural elements within a human-controlled environment, symbolize for me how people adapt and how spaces or objects can expand or shrink based on our psychological perspective.