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During his residency at Drumlanrig Castle, Sebastián Espejo approached painting as a practice of attentive wonderer – observing the subtle gestures of light, the shifting rhythms of the landscape and the fleeting moments in which nature and perception meet.
A particular focus of Espejo’s work during the residency was the exploration of blue – not merely as colour, but as a way of seeing. Most figurative painters give structure to their images using tonal arrangement, allowing them to remain legible in black and white. Espejo experimented with the possibility of painting using hue and saturation differences alone, creating forms that remain readable even when tonal values are similar. This approach echoes experiments by the Nabis, where removing saturation from a painting reveals how much the image relies on chroma rather than tone.
In the Scottish landscape, sky blue – the cerulean and luminous blue – is scarce. Deep blue shades appear in forest silhouettes, often only visible when looking toward distant horizons. This rare quality of bright blue mirrors the idea of shadow: an absence of light, a kind of negativity. Yet within darkness, subtle hues emerge, reflecting the convergence of all light waves. Observing these nuances – like the reflection of sky and grass in a shadowed cup outside – Espejo began experimenting with pale blue as shadow, creating effects where our eyes read shadow in terms of colour rather than value. This can be seen clearly in Albireo, and to varying degrees in River Nith, Fallen Tree, and Blue Shadows.
The castle, with its centuries-old stone, Baroque architecture, and the layers of history held within the Buccleuch Collection, offered a quiet presence, a lens through which the artist considered his own act of looking. In this space, time unfolds differently. The sun appears briefly, casting red and yellow across the landscape, while thick skies turn blue or pink, swallowing the world and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Trees dissolve into forests, forests into figures; trunks shed their summer skins, and leaves make final, silent encounters with the flight of birds. Wind and water trace the passage of days, while night transforms fallen matter into black mud. Mushrooms bloom on decaying trunks, shoots push tentatively through wet earth, and the cycles of life quietly persist. Espejo’s paintings capture these ephemeral transformations.
The castle and its surroundings become both canvas and collaborator, a place where memory, nature, and history converge. Occasional Blue invites us to enter this suspended world, to witness the delicate poetry of change, and to inhabit the fleeting moments when light, colour, and matter meet.
Artist-in-Residence Programme | HeritageXplore x The Dot Project
