Cave of emerald Waters
Cave Of Emerald Water
Sculpted oil paintings on panel.
30 × 34 × 2 in. 2026.
Green water held between a mountain and a cave.
The water is cold and completely still. I stand at the edge, unsure whether to enter or leave it untouched. Whether to swim or be quiet.
I found the pool in August of last year. I was not looking for it. I photographed it and did nothing with the photographs for eight months.
The place
The rock at the edge of that pool is smooth. It is smooth because of a thing that happens every year without fail. The snow up there is harsh and relentless. Then it melts, and all of it comes crashing down at once in summer while everything else is tearing green. The pools fill with what came down from the heavens months earlier.
Thousands of years of exactly that, and you get an edge you could run your hand along.
I am not going to tell you where it is. The culture around these places is find, jump, consume, leave. I would rather you stood at the edge for a while.
Elliott
Elliott Earls is an artist, designer, and filmmaker, and has led the graphic design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan, since 2001. His typefaces from the nineties sit in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. His YouTube channel, Studio Practice, is one of the few places where someone with real authority talks plainly about what a studio is for. He is one of the important critical voices of our moment, and he is generous with it.
This past winter he opened his calendar to his audience. Anyone could book a virtual studio visit. I got one of the slots.
I told him the story of the work and asked for his honest reaction. He gave it. The whole conversation is here.
Two things from that hour changed how I work.
The first was about the paintings. I had been carrying a worry that the work reads as a reference to impressionism, and that art-literate viewers stop at the reference and go no deeper. He told me the historical reference is a strength. In a room full of people chasing the contemporary, standing apart is where the creativity lives.
The second was about the phone. I had treated my presence online as a performance I could not make honest. He told me to treat it as a sketchbook. Post the way you draw. Regularly, and without checking the numbers. The reels I have been making since are that advice, taken literally.
At the end of the call he invited me to Cranbrook.
The drive
Fourteen hours to Michigan. I left at 5:42 in the morning.
I loaded a stack of plexiglass panels that already carried years of other paintings dried onto them, drove up through Ontario, slept in Cleveland, and arrived the next day.
Elliott Earls had invited me to Cranbrook Academy of Art to make a painting in front of graduate students over one week. Not a lecture. The actual work, in the room.
The room
It starts as charcoal. No colour for days.
People assume a painting this thick begins thick. It begins as a tonal drawing worked out on the panel, and the paint only goes on once the dark and the light are already decided. Everything after that is surface.
The students watched me take paint off the old plexiglass panels and build it into a new one. That is the whole method. It is much less impressive to describe than it is to watch.
I had not been in that kind of room in a long time. I had forgotten what it does to you. People looking hard at what you are making and asking you why. It was warm in a way I was not expecting.
I did the bulk of the painting there and finished it at home.
The painting
This one arrived fully formed. I do not have a better word for it.
Most paintings I fight. This one came together without me forcing it. The drawing, the colour, the surface, all of it landing where it needed to. That happens a few times in a life and you do not get to schedule it.
You cannot photograph this painting straight on. In flat light it disappears and reads as a picture of a cave. It takes a low sun coming across the surface to show that the cave is inches of paint standing off the panel. You can put a hand into the shadow.
At one scale, a landscape. At another, a jewel. Small enough to hold. Intense enough to feel endless.
The print
Cave of Emerald Waters becomes a print on Friday, October 9, at 9:00 AM Eastern. The shop closes Sunday, October 11, at 9:00 AM. Forty-eight hours, then the page comes down.
It is a timed edition. However many are ordered in those forty-eight hours is the entire edition. I print exactly that many, and sign and number each one out of that total.
The email list gets the link at 8:00 AM, a full hour before it goes public. That hour is the whole advantage. Sign up for the list here.
The original is available. Write me at majkowski.studio@gmail.com
