I started creating paintings with this theme around 2020, during the early days of Covid where I was working from home full-time, as there were still restrictions or at least strong hesitations on going back to the office.
Like most of my other watercolor paintings, this just seemed natural to me. I started painting intuitively - without planning where the "pebbles" would go, and just sort of paint new pebbles wherever it looked balanced. After putting in the big pebbles, I sometimes continued on painting tiny pebbles in between them, I think mostly because of boredom, because I wanted to just paint more. But then after putting down the pebbles, most of the time it felt incomplete, like it needed more - and that's when I would draw lines on them, or in between them. I would sometimes be structured about it - sometimes I like having white space in between, sometimes I wanted them touching one another - but it's one or the other. I also either would not repeat patterns within the pebbles, or would repeat patters in the same frequency - mostly twice. I enjoy randomness, but I also like order and structure somehow.
Then at some point, I guess because after painting pebbles randomly in varying sizes, I realized it can be a bit tedious to decide where the next random-sized pebble would go. And that's when I decided to try drawing pebbles in a grid. The first time I did this, before marking them with line patterns, I thought they looked pretty as they were - just watercolor. But of course I just had to put lines on them. I sometimes wish I can just duplicate the watercolor-only painting, keep the original, and draw the patterns on the copy. But hey, here we are, and I think they still look great. Trying to be structured and trying to be random at the same time. Like my life. Two polar opposites tugging at each other... wanting the freedom of randomness and going with the flow, but also wanting the traditional orderly, predictable path. Hey.
